"We are the Wolves": The New Lineage of Plays About Girls
An essay of sorts. Clearly some part of me yearns for grad school
This just in: Former Annie and poster child for Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ Sadie Sink is coming back to Broadway in Kimberly Belflower’s cult hit, John Proctor is the Villain. This is deeply thrilling to me, because while I have yet to see OR read the script for John Proctor, this means time has come for Broadway to feature a new Play About Girls.
Girlhood is having a specific moment in the media right now. We are in the era of trends like the ‘coquette girl aesthetic,’ terms like ‘25-year-old teenage girl,’ and hourlong video essays on ‘girlhood in film.’ Girlhood as an aestheticized and/or commodified concept isn’t new, but it’s interesting to see it take off in such a explicit way. And while Sadie Sink might be the one to bring Gen Z girlhood to Broadway, I think that John Proctor feels like a commercially viable production because of the off-Broadway plays that have come before it.
‘Plays About Girls’ is a niche new-ish genre (with a name I’ve coined), and a favorite of mine. You might be thinking, ‘that doesn’t sound like a genre, and that certainly doesn’t sound like a new idea.’ But I can refute these thoughts! As a genre, Plays About Girls can be described as ensemble stories about women between the ages of ~15 and 25. While these plays frequently use a physical group activity as a framing device (like a sport), they often focus on the social dynamics between girls who might not be friends, but share a common goal and/or find themselves repeatedly in close proximity to one another. These plays are exciting to me not just because it’s fun to see women my age on stage1, but more because the language in them is so natural and unselfconcious. When surrounded by their peers, girls are funny, empathic, nasty, and even feral, to use another zeitgeisty term of the girlhood era. For an art medium that so often is perceived as stuffy, what better way to engage a new generation of audience members than to put feral girls onstage?
To be fair, there have always been plenty of plays about young women. But so many of them are about how women relate, or fail to relate, to men: Oleanna, Job, Gruesome Playground Injuries, even Slave Play to an extent (these are also all written by men). Even in John Proctor’s inspiration, The Crucible, a play ostensibly about girls, most of the women are defined by their relationship to John Proctor himself, something I anticipate Bellflower’s work will dive into. But as we wait to watch/read the script of John Proctor is the Villain, I thought, ‘why not look at a few of Bellflower’s predecessors and contemporaries?’
The Wolves, with a brief nod to Sarah DeLappe’s later work
While The Crucible may predate it by 63 years, I’d credit Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves with kickstarting the Plays About Girls genre. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Wolves follows a girls soccer team as they meet weekly to warm up for their Saturday matches. As the girls stretch and run drills, their conversation topics range from periods to the Cambodian genocide to the weird new girl who lives in a yogurt yurt. Dialogue throughout the play is fast and loud and overlaps; it’s really only in the final scene when the girls’ language feels unified, in one moment of primal rage and angst that is “rabid and raw and Bacchic,” per DeLappe’s stage directions.
I saw the show’s London premiere in 2018, and all I could think was how refreshing it was to finally, finally! see a play about how young women talk to each other, to see a play where girls talked to each other multiple times. I don’t need to watch plays where girls talk to each other purely out of a feminist Alison Bechdellian necessity – it’s just nice. And funny. And so deliciously messy. It makes for good theater and feels truthful, because I’m not just watching girls talk, I’m watching my peers. Because, yeah, in a 15 minute conversation, my friends and I can go from talking about the election to Sally Rooney’s new book to the Mets to gynocologist recs, and you bet I’ll have found a way to make at least one very very stupid Intermezzo/InterMetsZo joke.
DeLappe, now 36, wrote The Wolves in her mid-20s, which seemed slightly crazy to me until I thought about it more — of course someone recently out of college would be the best person to write the minute details of young adult friendships! And lest you think that DeLappe is a one hit wonder, that her work is trapped within a certain millenial je ne sais quois, you’ll be pleased to know she also has a deep understanding of annoying Gen Z girls. In DeLappe’s script for Bodies Bodies Bodies, a group of 20-somethings decide to play a mystery game during a hurricane, and chaos ensues.
Bodies Bodies Bodies is a movie, not a play, and genre-wise, it’s murderer-mystery-horror-comedy where young women cause each others deaths, but it’s infused with DeLappe’s same sensibilities about language. And when I tell you I quote that script all the time, I mean all the time. “It’s a podcast about hanging out with your smartest and funniest friends” is absolutely something, I, a Gen Z girl myself, would say (in an ironic way, ofc). And “You are upper middle class. Your parents. They’re professors. They teach. At a university” might just be the most devastating blow a liberal arts girl can deal to another. It’s equal parts exciting and hilarious to see a story where the primary stake should be the threat of death, but instead is social stature.
Both The Wolves or Bodies Bodies Bodies are filled with snappy dialogue, social faux pas, and characters navigating death and loss in unexpected ways. But neither seems to be trying to make one specific point about girlhood or female friendship. The Wolves in particular feels like a slice-of-life play, and I understand why in 2016 that felt revolutionary, worthy of a Pulitzer nomination2.
How To Defend Yourself
Intentionally or not, Liliana Padilla’s 2019 play How To Defend Yourself is in direct conversation with The Wolves. Once again, we follow an eclectic group of young women as they meet regularly to exercise together, this time for a college “DIY” self-defense class. Again, the girls’ conversation topics are wide-ranging, often steering into the very violent (the play opens with a description of a video where a girl disarms a man who is holding a machine gun). Each student has different things they want out of the experience — a way to take action, fighting skills, an in with the popular girls, community. The difference here is that the community in How To Defend Yourself is borne out of tragedy; group leaders Kara and Brandi are inspired to start the class after one of their sorority sisters is brutally assaulted.
I wrote about this play after seeing it in 2023, and my takeaway was that the play feels true to the kinds of people I took classes with in college; the characters are well intentioned, hyper aware of their social status (or lack thereof), and sometimes uninformed in a way that could be labeled as problematic. Padilla doesn’t pass moral judgment on these characters, suggesting instead that they are still learning and a product of their environment. In fact, they actually offer their characters a great amount of empathy, and as an audience member, you’re not able to write any single one off or “cancel” them they way you might with a particularly annoying freshman in your Intro to American Studies class (not that I’m thinking of anyone in particular).
How To Defend Yourself is partially about learning to assert power and protect yourself from men while realizing the social capital that a boyfriend offers. The play does include male characters: two upperclassman boys. But there’s no need for them to be central characters — while they’re involved in the conflict, they’re on the periphery. Padilla does give both boys a certain interiority but they’re also present in the story just to represent a threat with a dangerous allure — one of the freshmen in the class unabashedly flirts with them, even as the audience is led to question the boy’s involvement or complicity in the assault.
So many plays about women being violated are somber, talk-heavy productions3, and while How To Defend Yourself doesn’t shy away from heavy issues, the heaviness is broken up through humor and the actor’s physicality. In New York Theatre Workshop’s production, there were stylized workout sequences between scenes, breaking up the fly-on-the-wall storytelling. I sometimes felt like these moments distracted from the story or felt a little girlboss-y, but I also appreciated that they showed the girls becoming more confident, each in their own way. Theater is a visual medium after all. Perhaps it’s easier to be immediately engaged by a ensemble driven ‘fly-on-the-wall’ play when the production starts with movement, the characters flying onto the stage, and the physical pace of the performers mirroring the pacing of the script. And perhaps the girls, particularly Brandi and Kara, found it easier to process or not process their own traumas while they were in motion.
Fish
Melis Aker’s Fish is a Play About Girls, female friendship and even physical activity, and it’s a mother-daughter story. A work in progress, it had its first public developmental presentation at Signature Theatre (my work lol4) in September. The story follows Karya, a British-Turkish teen whose brother has disappeared. Whether he’s died, gotten caught up in terrorist activities, or simply vanished for some other reason, Karya doesn’t know. What she does know is that her mother Ceyda is so focused on her grief that she cannot focus on her daughter5 the way Karya needs her to. Each finds a way to cope and seek connection: Ceyda enrolls herself and Karya in swimming lessons, and Karya, with some egging on from her best friend Libby, decides to catfish ISIS on Twitter.
At first Karya starts simple, DMing men and asking if they know her brother. This doesn’t work, piling onto her other frustrations; Ceyda’s emotional distance, Libby’s new relationship, the fact that Karya is the worst in her swim class. So, on Libby’s suggestion, Karya tries a new tactic, first sending sexy messages, then branching into photos.
Who among us hasn’t let our friends tease us into sending a risky text? One of the things I like most about Fish is how much it reminds me of my friendships in high school. Because a girl can be your best friend (Karya and Libby call each other “wifey”) and can also make you feel more insecure than anyone else. Karya seems to feel somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of sex and dating, but Libby has a boyfriend. Libby has lost her virginity. And Libby feels very comfortable bragging about it. I wonder how much of Karya’s motivation to sext with members of ISIS, to kiss her much older swimming instructor, even just to have her mom buy her tampons, is motivated by a fear that Libby is growing up without her, leaving her even more alone.
It’s all a little dark and disturbing, but you almost don’t realize the extent of it, because Aker infuses so much warmth and humor into her characters. Ceyda is genuinely funny, and Karya and Libby are silly teenage girls. They aren’t *just* silly teenage girls (they contain multitudes), but they also find themselves in ridiculous situations, share a bathroom stall, make dumb jokes, affectionately call each other ‘cunts.’ It’s sweet and funny and so wonderfully familiar. Obviously I’ve never catfished ISIS, but my friends and I have gone too far for a dumb bit before6. That’s what girls aged 15 to 25 are supposed to do, and I’m glad Aker put it onstage.
The genre, continued (some spoilers ahead!)
The Wolves, How To Defend Yourself, and Fish all end with noise and a sort of release. The Wolves howl, the students slide back in time to a loud house party, and Karya and Ceyda yell into their empty house, imagining they’re yelling into the Aegean Sea. In each, it’s cathartic and thrilling, almost an exorcism for what the women have gone through. It makes sense after such busy, movement-filled stories to let the characters finally stand still and yell — they need it. And when else would they get to? As disruptive as it is, as much as it might irritate an old audience members ears or sensibilities, it makes for a satisfying ending.
These are 3 plays I’ve spent time with, but this genre (and especially the phenomena of Plays About Girls in Sports) continues to grow. The craziest thing? They’re all good, and largely pretty critically acclaimed. Now I could get on my soapbox and go off about how we could have always been writing and producing plays about girls instead of wasting time with plays where men do not shut up. But instead I will continue my quest to read the script of John Proctor Must Die, and leave you with a list of Plays About Girls, some which I’ve read, some which I have not. Enjoy!
School Girls, or The African Mean Girls Play - Jocelyn Bioh
Our Dear Dead Drug Lord - Alexis Scheer
If Pretty Hurts, Ugly Must be a MuhFucka - Tori Sampson
The Wolves - Sarah DeLappe (soccer)
How To Defend Yourself - Liliana Padilla (self-defense class)
Flex - Candrice Jones (basketball)
Dance Nation - Clare Barron (dance)
The Sensational Sea Mink-ettes - Vivian J.O. Barnes (dance)
Fish - Melis Aker (swimming)
Dry Land - Ruby Rae Spiegel (swimming)
John Proctor is the Villain - Kimberly Bellflower
And a few plays about women that may have inspired the genre
For Colored Girls… - Ntozake Shange
Fefu and Her Friends - Maria Irene Fornes
Top Girls - Caryl Churchill
For the purposes of here and now let’s ignore the fact that I recently turned 26.
And frankly, it still is!
Which is also valid! This is not a diss!
LOL yeah I am gonna write about a play from my workplace!
Very “He’s not hereee. I am hereeeeee” of Melis
Does the phrase “Office of the Medical Investigator chain link fence” mean anything to anyone here? No? The mind forgets but my favorite leggings do not.
We love women (girls)!!