Last week, Mary Moody Northen Theater’s second show of the season, “The Wolves,” premiered starring a group of girls who take on more than just a rival team. Navigating life and relationships as teenagers in America, nine young women take to the soccer field.
“It’s not about what happens,” senior Lillian Harlow said. “It’s not about soccer, either. I think it really does a good job at showing what young female conversations look like, because it’s written by a woman. I think it does a really good job of cutting a slice of life and showing how girls going into adulthood act and are discovering and experiencing the world.”
The show is about the conversations about growing up and difficult situations handled between teenage girls; it is a telling of girlhood. The entirety of the show takes place at soccer practice, something the cast said didn’t come easy.
“I’ve never played soccer before,” senior Vivi Verges said. “This was my first time ever learning anything about soccer. I literally knew nothing about the game. I literally started from ground zero, but it was a really fun ride.”
Fellow MMNT actor Christian Meaux collaborated with the cast to teach them how to play.
“He played soccer for nine years and came in and worked with us every single day,” Harlow said. “So at the beginning of rehearsal, we had a whole hour we dedicated to soccer drills and running soccer, and our bodies hurt.”
According to Verges, the key to turning out a good show wasn’t just in learning soccer. Before the girls could think about walking out onto that field, they had to learn the script in depth. While soccer plays a large role in the aesthetic and motivations of the show, the dialogue was paramount to perfect.
“I think also one of the challenges with this show is we physically could not get up on our feet and block the show until we were intensely, intensely familiar with the script,” Verges said. “Because like if we went up there and didn’t know anything about the script and tried to learn the soccer drills, we would have been a hot mess.”
Blocking in a production is when the director and actors work on how characters will move throughout the show. Blocking soccer within the show works as a vessel to show viewers the casual, and sometimes not-so-casual, conversations conducted within female relationships. It sets the stage for the discussions about abortion, sex and female friendships that are happening among women all over the world.
“It’s a play about women written by women,” junior Anna Southern said. “I think, you know, anyone can come see it. But I think specifically, it’s important for young women, older women and just any woman to come and just revisit those conversations that they had when they were younger, and finally see something that really happened on stage.”
The show also sheds light on femininity in ways that feel close to most women.
“I also feel like this show is different from anything we’ve ever done at MMNT,” Verges said. “We’ve never done a show, at least that I’m aware of, that (has) been only women. The show is completely outside of the male gaze, which I think is a rarity in modern playwriting to see that. So that’s why it’s unlike, I think, anything St. Ed’s has ever done; anything I’ve ever done personally.”
“The Wolves” is showing for one more weekend and tickets can be bought online.
