Fort Lewis College Theatre Presents The Wolves

The Fort Lewis College Theatre Department presents the award-winning one-act play “The Wolves,” written by Sarah DeLappe and directed by associate professor Felicia Lansbury Meyer. The play features an all-female cast and centers on the conversations of a high school girls soccer team. “The Wolves” runs from February 29th through March 3rd at the Gallery Theatre in Fort Lewis College Theatre building. You’re watching the Local News Network brought to you by The Payroll Department and Freddy’s Frozen Custard. I’m Sadie Smith.

“The Wolves” is the story of nine high school girls on a soccer team in their pregame warmups. So they’re in this space, in this space actually, warming up together. And during this warmup, which is a physical activity they do, they’re having these conversations about what’s going on in politics, what’s going on in their personal lives. There’s a lot of competition between them for knowledge and a lot of friendships and broken friendships. And it’s all the dramas that unfold in adolescence. That these girls are warming up for this soccer game, but they’re dealing with all of this very intense stuff that’s going on in the world at the same time and trying to process it.

In addition to its ensemble cast, “The Wolves” has been produced by a crew of mostly student designers, stage managers, as well as assistant directed by junior theater major Caroline Mousner. The actors also worked with FLC assistant coach and former Skyhawk soccer star Hayley Hollenga to hone their footwork and embody their characters.

It’s a wonderful team, mostly women, and that’s been wonderful and very empowering for them to deal with this material and to be with each other, dealing with this very vulnerable, sensitive material. The playwright, Sarah DeLappe, has created an orchestra with nine different voices. So each character is a voice in the orchestra, and sometimes it’s a cacophony and it’s just all these voices at once. And that’s really difficult for these actors to learn those lines and been quite an accomplishment for them. But also, it’s beautiful to listen to the different sounds, the different voices coming in.

The unconventional and timely play was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2017.

There’s a moment in “The Wolves” when one of the soccer players, number 46, looks up and sees a bird flying in the dome, it’s an indoor field, soccer field. She sees a bird trapped in there. And I really think of that as one of the central metaphors of the play, that the girls have these wings and they’re trapped within this space. They have their wings, they feel ready to fly, they feel their independence, but they’re not quite there yet. They don’t have freedom yet. So there’s the struggle there too as well. I would like the audience to come away with a feeling that they want to share a sense of freedom and wildness within their own communities ’cause these girls have their own community and in it, they can be 100% who they are. They can be wild, they can be fierce. They can say what they’re thinking or not say what they’re thinking. It’s just a real community in this space, in this pre-game warmup space.

To purchase tickets to “The Wolves,” visit durangoconcerts.com. For more information about this and other stories, visit DurangoLocal.News. Thank you for watching edition of the Local News Network. I’m Sadie Smith.