It was fun to read The Wolves after the last two books I read, because it felt like there were some commonalities, while all three are also very different works. Each act of The Wolves is set at an indoor soccer field, where we see a team of teenage girls warming up before their weekly Saturday games, which reminded me of the structure of Nick Hornby’s State of the Union and the way each chapter shows the same couple having drinks at a pub before their weekly counseling session. And like Halle Butler’s The New Me, though less bleakly/less cynically, The Wolves is all about female interactions: all the men in the play (the coach, characters’ brothers or boyfriends or fathers) are all off-stage. That’s where the similarities end, but I found them satisfying nonetheless.
I’d love to see a production of The Wolves and am sad I missed it when it played in New York in 2016 and in 2017: it was an enjoyable read, but I imagine it would really come to life on stage. In the script, the characters are referred to as their jersey numbers: we don’t learn any of their names until nearly the end, and there are several characters whose names we don’t learn at all. Some of the characters are very distinctive, but I had trouble keeping a few of them straight. The dialogue, though, is great: I love how we get the girls’ overlapping conversations, which contain everything from talk about world affairs to discussions of tampons to trash talk and insults to tensions between friends. They talk about their sorry excuse for a coach, who always seems to be hung-over, and how the boys’ team has a much better coach; they talk about the Khmer Rouge and Lord of the Rings and what they’re learning in school. Most of the team members have been playing together for years, but there’s one home-schooled new girl, who struggles to know how to be social/how to join this group of girls who have all known each other for ages, who have all these shared jokes and memories that she doesn’t know about. Pauses and silences and awkward moments are vividly rendered, too, and I like the way we get to know these characters and the many things going on in their lives, even though we only ever see them in their weekly time together on the AstroTurf before the game.
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