The Wolves at PlayMakers Rep Is Fierce, Funny, and Utterly Human

This article was published by Triangle Review on 13 October 2025.

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Inside UNC-Chapel Hill's Paul Green Theatre, the audience walks not into a theater, but onto a field. A bright green expanse of AstroTurf stretches across the stage, as if the audience has stumbled into a Saturday morning scrimmage. The bleachers rise from the edge of this miniature arena, wrapping the spectators directly into the space of the players. Before a word is spoken, director Aubrey Snowden's staging of Sarah DeLappe's The Wolves announces its athletics-driven intent.

DeLappe's Pulitzer Prize-nominated script is an exhilarating cacophony of conversation. Set across several winter Saturdays in suburban America, The Wolves follows nine teenage girls -- known by their jersey numbers -- as they stretch, jog, and gossip before their indoor soccer matches. Through their chatter -- sometimes political, sometimes profane, always authentic -- emerges a portrait of a generation learning to balance selfhood with solidarity.

The cast, trained in teamwork and footwork by former UNC soccer player Brianna Pinto, move with the kinetic coordination of a true team. They stretch in sync, pass balls, and finish each other's sentences. At times, when all nine talk at once, the result is nearly symphonic -- a swirl of sound in which meaning flashes in shards. It's musical, lyrical even; and Snowden choreographs it so cleanly that the moments of silence land like heartbeats. I found myself wanting to see the play again just to catch the conversations that I missed the first time.

The ensemble -- composed of graduate students in UNC's Professional Actor Training Program (PATP), undergraduates, and alumni -- is uniformly excellent. Katie Stevens stands out as #13, the team's resident clown, whose irreverence barely conceals the longing for connection beneath. Her comedic timing is spot on, and her warmth makes her the emotional glue of the team.

Celeste Pelletier garners respect as the understated and underappreciated #46, the newcomer whose awkward sincerity and quiet resilience gradually win both her teammates and the audience's hearts.

Elizabeth Dye, as the fierce and defiant #7, captures the brittle bravado of teenage rebellion without ever tipping into caricature; her scenes crackle with energy.

The rest of the team -- Swetha Anand (#2), Delaney Jackson (#11), Caroline Marques (#14), Jadah Johnson (#8), Lily Kays (#25), and Mengwe Wapimewah (#00) -- brings equally rich texture to the field. And when Dana Marks finally enters as Soccer Mom, her brief scene is devastatingly awkward, believable, and sad.

The sense of ensemble in The Wolves is palpable. In the play, as on a successful soccer team, no one upstages another, even when chaos reigns. Playwright Sarah DeLappe has said that she conceived The Wolves as an "orchestration," in which the characters' voices function like instruments in a score. Director Aubrey Snowden's production fully realizes that musicality.

Scenic designer Yi-Hsuan (Ant) Ma transforms the Paul Green Theatre into an indoor soccer field so convincing that one half-expects a ball to ricochet into the audience. Pamela A. Bond's costumes -- matching jerseys, shin guards, and messy ponytails -- capture the visual realism of teenage athletes, while Abigail Hoke-Brady's lighting subtly marks the passage of weeks, moods, and emotional weather. Daniel Baker's sound design is flawless. The technical team deserves credit -- especially since design in this kind of realism is most impressive when it's unnoticed.

PlayMakers Rep's production of The Wolves also reflects the best of the Department of Dramatic Art's Professional Actor Training Program. The production bridges the professional and the educational, offering its MFA and undergraduate actors the rare opportunity to work together under professional conditions. The result is not an academic exercise, but a fully realized, emotionally resonant piece of theater. As Snowden herself was once captain of her all-girls prep-school soccer team, she has experienced both the athletic discipline and vulnerability that she conjures in the privileged adolescent female players on The Wolves.

Beneath its humor and physicality, The Wolves is a meditation on belonging -- on what it means to be part of a collective. After overhearing New Yorkers casually discuss war-torn regions in the Middle East, The Wolvesbecame DeLappe's way of examining American exceptionalism through the microcosm of a girls' soccer team. The result is a funny and fierce look at the stressors of being a privileged American adolescent, and the resiliency that comes from being part of a collective.