The Wolves: A Play

While coming-of-age stories are a common trope, the uniqueness of adolescent girlhood is often neglected and even more often misrepresented. The play undermines traditional representations of girlhood and womanhood, which fail to comprehend the complexities of femininity. Even when there are more expansive depictions of women and varied gender roles, rarely are girls shown as they are. The girls in the play are athletes, but many of them also exhibit their femininity, no matter how hard they push their bodies. The pressures they put on their bodies instead parallel the pressures all women’s bodies endure, through shame over menstruation and conformance to patriarchal weight standards.

The team’s strength and discipline are strongly feminine, with #13 even noting the girls’ menstrual cycles have synced and #7 joking about a ball soaked with menstrual blood. The text suggests their femininity is Amazonian. But these girls are also still teenagers. At 16 and 17, they are on the cusp of adulthood, but they are still girls. The play’s loose structure, organized by the regularity of weekly pre-game rituals, is united only by the messiness of their adolescence, in which femininity ultimately means something different to each of them.