“Good ideas come from everywhere,” says Mark Booher, associate dean at Allan Hancock College and Artistic Director of the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts (PCPA). He’s talking about choosing plays, but he might just as well be expressing the mind-set of the great playwrights, past and present, whose scripts have earned enduring places in the repertoire. Because nothing human is alien to the stage, theater, an art form that’s thousands of years old, continues to evolve. In recent times, that evolution has meant more stories by, for, and about women.
Take The Wolves, the fascinating new play that’s at PCPA’s Severson Theatre in Santa Maria through March 24. Sarah DeLappe’s award-winning 2016 drama follows a girls’ club soccer team through six weeks of a tumultuous indoor season. Each scene occurs in the warmup area of a bubble-covered playing field, where the performers stretch, practice, talk, and grow up. The script identifies cast members by number rather than by name, a deliberate artistic choice on the part of the playwright that has important consequences. According to director Karin Hendricks, DeLappe “wanted it to be a huge choice,” adding that “it works very well.”
Bright-green synthetic turf covers Jason Bolen’s eye-catching set, and Elisabeth Weidner’s sound design pumps punkish riot-grrrl rock during the changeovers. The Wolves takes place in the present, somewhere in the American suburbs. With its all-female cast and a fearless approach that depicts these nine young women as at once tender and profane, harsh and vulnerable, The Wolves quickly became the hottest new play to hit the American stage in recent years. In order to better understand how one of the most talked-about shows of the 2016 Off-Broadway season became a nationwide phenomenon, I traveled to Santa Maria to see what the excitement was about.
