The Wolves: A Play

The Wolves, a play by Sarah DeLappe, was developed at Playwrights Horizons in 2015 and debuted Off-Broadway in 2016. The titular Wolves are a suburban girls’ indoor soccer team, comprising nine girls, aged 16 to 17 years old, who are unnamed and identified only by their jersey numbers. The play is presented in one act with no intermission, each of the six scenes set on a consecutive Saturday as the girls warm up and prepare for their weekly games. In her preface to the Off-Broadway edition of The Wolves (2018), DeLappe likens their preparations to warriors readying for battle. They have (mostly) been playing together for over a decade, and they are competitive and undefeated with little to no assistance from their ineffectual male coach. The play, DeLappe’s first, was immediately successful. In 2015, it received the American Playwriting Foundation’s first Relentless Award. The play was a 2015-16 finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. In 2017, the play returned to Off-Broadway with a limited engagement at Lincoln Center’s Mitzie Newhouse Theater, for which it won an Obie Award in 2017 for Ensemble work. The Wolves was also a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, “For a timely play about a girls’ high school soccer team that illuminates with the unmistakable ping of reality the way young selves are formed when innate character clashes with external challenges” (“