DeLappe's play about high school girl soccer players was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for drama; what effect will the Net Neutrality vote have on content creators and distributors?; an old fashioned marquee gives a theater company a new identity.
Sarah DeLappe's 'The Wolves' imagines a girls soccer team as soldiers at war
Sarah DeLappe's play, "The Wolves," examines the lives of an often underrepresented group in theater — teenage girls.
The one-act play, now running at New York’s Lincoln Center, follows an all-girls soccer team between matches. As they stretch out and prepare for practices and games, the nine teenaged characters discuss everything from the Khmer Rouge to unplanned pregnancies.
"The Wolves" was a finalist this year for the Pulitzer Prize for drama and is winning all sorts of accolades. DeLappe says the origins of the play go all the way back to when she was just nine years old, watching the 1999 Women's World Cup finals at the Rose Bowl — the famous game when Brandi Chastain ripped off her jersey after scoring the winning goal.
The Frame host John Horn spoke with DeLappe about "The Wolves" and what it has meant to audiences to see teenaged girls represented in this way on stage.
Interview Highlights
On whether there's a "through line" from DeLappe watching the Women's World Cup final as a young girl to writing "The Wolves":
I think so ... and I think it's unconscious. And yet, there is a moment in the play that I feel pretty explicitly borrows from that moment — at least visually. Which for me has to do with women being strong in their bodies as opposed to objectifying themselves. And there's something about that moment that did, in a way, feel like a perfect sports movie moment. It's that moment of triumph and it's that moment of excellence.
On her transition from actor to playwright:
I went through this period of really wanting to be an actor and really enjoying acting. But I guess as I got older and was in college and started to see the kind of roles I was cast in — many of which were ingénues, a couple of which involved me with a ring of flowers on my head — I got bored with it. And I also got bored with my level of agency as an actor. You don't have a lot of power over what roles you get cast in.
JOHN HORN: Because of the kind of plays that had been written?
Yes, because of the kind of roles that were available to you. And the way that you have to be comfortable using your body and your image as your talent. And that's what's getting you cast. Which is part of the reason why I came to writing. Also because I think I wanted to create those roles for women. And I wanted to create the world as opposed to being plugged into it.
On the initial inspiration that led to her writing "The Wolves":
The play actually came from language first. I went to this art exhibit that was called "Here and Elsewhere" at the New Museum in the summer of 2014. And there was something about that experience. The art itself was quite political in content. It was a survey of contemporary art from the Middle East and North Africa. And so here was all of this art from Iraqi and Syrian and Lebanese artists. And here were all of these cosmopolitan New Yorkers sort of taking it in. It was art that was coming out of conflict, war and suffering. And there was something about that which was pretty obvious. And yet for me, for some reason, when I was going home on the subway, I started typing this dialogue flow of all these simultaneous conversations, which is how the play starts. And one of the conversations is about the Khmer Rouge, and the other is about the efficacy of tampons or pads on a soccer field. And the play sort of developed from there. I quickly figured out who was saying these things, that they were teenage girls, and that they were on an indoor soccer field.
On the visceral impact of the play on adolescent audiences in particular:
I have had a couple of conversations with teenagers or young adults who have come to see the play, particularly women. I'm remembering one: We did the play last year at New York Stage and Film at Vassar, and this group of high school students came to see the show, so the audience was almost entirely high school students. And they were so viscerally engaged with the performance in a way that most audience members are too jaded to be. But I also think there's something about seeing their experience on stage in a way that isn't patronizing to their experience, and also isn't trying to make them sound like anything other than the way they actually talk. At least that's what a couple of teenage audience members have told me before. That there was something so moving to them about hearing teenage girls speak like teenage girls. The highest compliment I've received on the play is from the mouths of teenage girls. I couldn't ask for anything more.
Do theaters still need marquees in the digital age?
When the Antaeus Theatre Company debuted its new space in Glendale, the marquee was not yet installed. At first glance you might think a marquee isn’t important anymore — you can just Google where the theater is and GPS how to get there. But Bill Brochtrup, one of Antaeus’s artistic directors, thinks differently:
“From the beginning, we knew a marquee was an important part of the design of the building because we are in downtown Glendale, We need people to know that we’re here … that we've arrived, that we are not going anywhere and we’ll be part of this landscape for long time. A marquee says that.”
Antaeus Theatre is a nondescript sandy colored building, sandwiched in between a Marshalls and a mall on a busy strip of E. Broadway. A quick survey of people on the street revealed that no one knew it was a theater. Without a marquee, it just looked like an office building to them.
Escott Norton, executive director of the Los Angeles Historic Theatre Foundation, says marquees are crucial to theater design:
“The show begins when you're walking down the street and you see this beautiful thing and you want to get drawn into it.”
Norton is referring to a famous quote from S. Charles Lee, one of L.A.’s most prolific theater architects: "The show starts on the sidewalk." Architects such as Lee designed movies theaters and their marquees to catch people’s attention and make them want to enter a world of fantasy. Think about the the Mayan Theatre, the Egyptian Theatre and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre — the very design of these buildings seeks to transport patrons to a far of land.
Marquees are often the first thing people notice at a theater, and their design has changed a lot over time. These ubiquitous symbols of showbiz tell us a lot more than just who’s preforming on a given night. Their design often reflects the ethos of the theater itself, and the cultural, social and political history of Los Angeles when it was built.
In the 1910s, theater builders looked to Europe for inspiration and tried to evoke the luxury and opulence of places like the Paris Opera or Versailles. Marquees of this era were mainly focused on competing with each other to lure in pedestrians. Marquee letters were smaller, with white letters on black backgrounds easily read by people walking by. Also, they were more like rectangular awnings than the marquees we know today.
In the 1920s and '30s, a truly American style that Norton calls "Hollywood Fantasy" appears on the scene. Theaters were inspired by the most "exotic" events of the era, such as the discovery of King Tut's tomb and the opening of China. These were direct inspirations for the Egyptian Theatre and Grauman’s Chinese.
During the Great Depression, fantasy was replaced by function. Economic recession, and the culture of excess that was responsible for it, pushed American designers to move away from opulence. Streamline Moderne marquees were much simpler and had fewer words and bigger letters — often just the name of the theatre itself.
Then, car culture became the single biggest driver of marquee design for the next half century.
[Marquees] were redesigned for the car centric culture. They changed into a sort of trapezoid shape so that the signs were angled so you could see them as you're driving by.
World War II brought a shortage of materials. The theaters of the post-war years were mainly made of glass and concrete, which were the only materials readily available during the war and in the decade or so that followed. Marquees got even bigger so they could be seen from Eisenhower’s newly built freeway system.
How does this history influence how marquees are designed today? Antaeus’ marquee was finally installed this fall, but to understand its design you need some background on the company. It’s a collective of actors, many of whom work in film and TV. They formed Antaeus so they could do the kind of a classical theater they originally fell in love with. They do old plays in new ways and are exploring doing new plays with classic themes.
As for their marquee: it’s got a black background, with white letters, like the classic theaters of the 1910s. But it’s a trapezoid shape with big letters that can be read from a car driving by. A blend of old and new, just like Antaeus. Function and simplicity were two main factors that shaped their design committee decisions.
Now that the theater has a marquee, a quick survey of people on the street showed that most recognized the building as a performing arts center. It seems even if we don’t need marquees to tell us what’s playing, we still need them to pick theaters out from the urban landscape. In the Internet age, the show still starts on the sidewalk.