On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, ConVal Drama performed The Wolves by Sarah de Lappe. De Lappe was a MacDowell Colony Fellow in the fall of 2019 and visited with students at ConVal in November.
The Wolves takes place in an indoor soccer facility where members of a soccer squad — “The Wolves” — go trough warmup routines and stretching exercises while discussing personal relationships, popular culture topics, politics, and the lives of some of the adults with whom they interact.
Each of the girls is identified only by their jersey number, a reflection of both their intensely cultivated team identity and the incurious anonymity of the high school life that surrounds them. Throughout the play, which takes place over several weeks in the soccer season leading up to the final game, each team member struggles to assert her individuality while also being part of a group.
The Wolves was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the Yale Drama Series Prize, and received the American Playwriting Foundation’s inaugural Relentless Award.