Texas State Theatre Department will put on its own production of “The Wolves”, the story of an all-girls soccer team. Audiences will see the team try to navigate goals in the game and in life, together.
“The Wolves”’ is a 90-minute play set in 2010. The play follows a soccer team of nine teenage girls as they navigate day-to-day life, arguments, personal tragedy and adolescent questions.
“You get to see each girl’s perspective based on how they grew up and everything,” Nyah Alder, a performance and production sophomore, said. “You get to see a glimpse of each different character and each character is so unique.”
Alder, the actress as #8 on “The Wolves”, got into theatre after going to see Phantom of the Opera on Broadway at 12-years-old. Adler feels a connection to “The Wolves” as she used to play soccer before giving it up for theater.
“I think getting to kind of mix those two together and play soccer again is awesome,” Alder said. “It’s making me [want to] play again, because it’s so fun.”
Working on this play for the past month and a half has meant a lot of different things and has provided different experiences for the cast. For Leslie Hill-King, a performance and production senior and actress as #13 on “The Wolves”, something that has made working on this play an awesome experience is being a part of an all-female cast.
“You don’t get to see plays that often that have the female perspective on life. I think that’s really cool,” said Hill-King. “It’s just a bunch of girls having fun and making theater.”
Hill-King also said something that makes this play unique to others is that it isn’t really a character driven play.
“It’s very real,” said Hill-King. “Everyone is almost acting as if [they] stepped into the character instead of changing themselves to be a character.”
Throughout the process of working on the play, the cast have created rituals and steps in order to get into character and connect with the character on a personal level. Alizzah Maravilles, a performance and production senior and actress as #46 on “The Wolves” created a Spotify playlist to help with her process.
“Every character that I play, I make a Spotify playlist,” Maravilles said. “I just fill it with songs that I think 46 would listen to, songs that remind me of the show just to get into that headspace.”
Not only are the characters unique and different, they also make it clear that they are not perfect people either. The characters range from characters like #13 who is the class clown and always making jokes to rile everyone up, to characters like #8, who is very immature and is smarter than she’s actually playing.
“I think one thing that we don’t get to see enough of is women and queer people being bad people,” Hill-King said. “Seeing that people are all people and that kind of thing. A lot of ‘The Wolves’ characters are not perfect human beings but still worthy of love.”
The play will be showing at 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 29 to Dec. 2 at the Patti Strickel Harrison Foundation Studio Theatre.
