Marin Theatre Company’s ‘The Wolves,’ about a girls’ soccer team, a shut-out win

Let’s say your mental image of high school girls already goes beyond the upward-inflecting, “like”-spouting, phone-dependent stuff of pernicious and tired stereotype. Maybe you already know that, among intimates, young women can be ribald, aggressive (that’s emphatically not passive-aggressive), tell-it-like-it-is — qualities we typically allow only their male counterparts.

Even if you’re so enlightened, Marin Theatre Company’s “The Wolves” paints young womanhood with the sort of breathtaking verisimilitude that can’t but humble you. Set exclusively during the warm-ups of an elite girls’ suburban soccer team, Sarah DeLappe’s play, whose West Coast premiere opened Tuesday, March 20, offers a forbidden window into an insular world.

Conversation is so unfiltered, so private, that you want to hold your breath for fear of disrupting it. Even the banal chitchat that opens the show mesmerizes. Subject matter bounces from menstruation to China’s censorship of the Internet to the Khmer Rouge, delivered in a flurry that’s as athletic and as dizzying as the girls’ myriad stretches and drills, which they execute as if they were synchronized swimmers.

The program refers to the nine players not by their names but by their jersey numbers, and one of the show’s foremost delights is to see those numbers emerge into fully fleshed-out individuals, and then reemerge into still more complicated, more multifaceted beings. There’s awkward new girl #46 (Neiry Rojo), who has a way of creepily sidling up behind someone that Peter Lorre would envy but whose background turns out to be far more cosmopolitan than her more provincial teammates can fathom. There’s #25 (Sango Tajima), the team captain forced to be more of an adult than the rest as she takes on coaching duties their actual coach, hungover or asleep, at best phones in. There’s #2 (Isabel Langen), who, though more sheltered than her peers — “We don’t have a TV” — also evinces uncommon maturity. She can issue a genuine apology when she goofs up out of naivete, and she has the empathy to envision and lament someone else’s hardships.

The actors, directed by Morgan Green, own their characters with marrow-deep certainty. Langan gives #2 a tremulousness that’s equally capable of bursting into tears or cheering with a stentorian peal. Rarely has someone reveled in stoner argot as joyfully as Nicole Apostol Bruno’s #13, all “rad,” “dude” and “righteous.” As #8, Carolyn Faye Kramer walks through the world with such all-consuming shock and dismay that you pine for a spinoff “#8 Show” that’s just her saying “eww” and “you guys” all the time.

Wins and losses ostensibly move “The Wolves” forward — not just in the games but in injuries, in college scouts being interested in some players but not in others, no matter how hardworking or deserving they might be. But what strikes most about these plot points is how randomly doled out they seem — how any player, truly, could have been the one catapulted to further success or infelicitously benched. To see the play is to step back into high school and appreciate how much luck played a part in the teenage miracles or calamities we credited or blamed ourselves for.

But “The Wolves” also paints all of youth as a miracle. To see it is to remember a time when you could make mortifying mistakes and then immediately rebound, when you were open enough to blunder your way into ceaseless learning. It conjures a time when the ball’s rustle on the Astroturf, the thrill of speed and skill, the appreciation of your teammates’ athletic prowess could be enough, as it never quite is again later in life, to unite a group of disparate creed and class in common purpose: to shoot and score.

Theater review: ‘The Wolves’ has bite in dynamic Marin Theatre Company debut

There’s something fascinatingly unusual going on in the West Coast premiere of “The Wolves” at Marin Theatre Company. Playwright Sarah DeLappe’s debut play, which premiered off-Broadway in 2016, puts us in the room with a high school girls’ indoor soccer team somewhere in Middle America as they train and warm up for weekend games.

Kristen Robinson’s spacious set really conjures up the wide-open expanse of an indoor soccer field, with high institutional walls and artificial turf. But more than anything, what creates the illusion of an actual team actually preparing to play is the deft physicality of the young performers in the all-female cast of 10 in this dynamic production directed by New York-based Marin native Morgan Green (who reportedly played soccer herself when she was a student at Redwood High School). Nine local high school students act as understudies.

More often than not, the players are in motion. They’re stretching, doing exercises, kicking the ball back and forth with keen precision. And they’re always talking, sometimes conversing as a group, sometimes having overlapping cross-conversations, whether it’s about half-understood world events, tampons or gossip about classmates.

The play is really a portrait of these young women, more as a team than as individuals. The players are never referred to by their names, although they sometimes mention unseen classmates by name, so when we actually hear a couple of their names late in the play it’s disorienting in an effective way.

We get to know them to a limited degree by osmosis, just by hanging out and watching them do their thing. Sango Tajima functions as an upbeat team captain, rallying the troops in the absence of their unseen and seemingly useless coach. Emma Roos is the hotshot team striker who affects a hard-boiled, standoffish stance with her teammates, bonding mainly with Jannely Calmell in semi-abusive banter. Betsy Norton is largely silent but tremendously affecting as the anxiety-plagued lone wolf goalie who always clams up before matches and usually has to run off to throw up at least once.

Isabel Langen is an earnest and insecure girl with an eating disorder, while Nicole Apostol Bruno is loud and hearty, Carolyn Faye Kramer bewildered and weepy, and Portland Thomas is contemplative and exhausted from talking to her two exhausting therapist parents. Neiry Rojo is amusingly and touchingly awkward in trying to join the conversation as a homeschooled newbie to the otherwise close-knit team.

Liz Sklar enters late but makes an indelible impression as a Soccer Mom trying to remain upbeat in a devastating, rambling monologue. In a sense it’s the most play-like moment in the play, but it’s no less effective for that.

The scene changes are dramatic in themselves, the blackouts further obscured by bright lights around the edge of the stage in Masha Tsimring’s lighting design and loud sounds of panting and percussive collisions in Madeline Oldham’s sound design.

The play doesn’t have a plot in a conventional sense. Things happen, to be sure, but mostly between scenes, and they’re alluded to and talked around more than actually discussed. That makes it all the more alarming when it suddenly becomes starkly clear that something terrible has happened and our ears perk up to glean what it might be, hanging on any hint of details and scanning the stage for who’s as yet unaccounted for.

“The Wolves” is marvelously effective at conjuring that sensation of just being in the room and scrambling to catch up with what’s happening in a way that feels fresh and utterly involving. It makes one curious to discover what else this first-time playwright might have in store for us in the future.