Being a teenage girl is hard. Like, super hard. Everything is embarrassing, devastating, and heart-breaking, and every little thing is literally the end of the world. The Wolves, by Sarah DeLappe, tells the story of an all-girls indoor soccer team in the throes of teenagehood, for better or for worse.

The play’s titular soccer team, the Wolves, consists of nine girls, all very different but all united by one thing: their love of soccer. Some of the girls are loud, brutish, and outspoken, some of the girls are quieter and more reserved, and some of the girls are so anxious they throw up before every soccer game. As someone with almost a decade of experience as a teenage girl, I found that The Wolves perfectly encapsulates the experience and handles the tough stuff that comes with it with grace and care. Periods, anxiety disorders, sports injuries, challenging class subjects, eating disorders, loss of loved ones: The Wolves has it all.

The set design, by Andrée-Ève Archambault, is beautiful and perfectly executed. A dome-like structure hangs from the ceiling, representing the airdome the girls play indoor soccer in.  The floor, painted to look like a soccer field, expands upwards past the floor of the stage and stretches up, the lines on the field providing a forced perspective that makes the soccer field appear to go on forever. On the sides of the stage hangs netting, cleverly lit from behind to make the field look as if it continues beyond what we can see, giving the illusion that there are more soccer fields and more girls playing soccer just outside of our field of view.

As the girls warm up before the games, they stretch in sync, showing their team unity, and showing how out of sync any girls new to the team would be. However, this could have been executed better: the team was often out of sync when it was clear they were supposed to be together. This, unfortunately, took away from the story, as it made it very hard to tell which of the girls was supposed to be the awkward new girl, and which girls had been on the team for a long time.

The actors of The Wolves, all art students at uOttawa, were exceptional. However, there were a few that stood out amongst all of the talent. Hannah Amerinejad commanded the stage with their portrayal of #25, the powerful and in charge team captain. In her portrayal of the new girl #46, Abigail Steeves captured the shyness and angst that comes from being the newest (and the weirdest!) girl on the team. Rose Juleanna Sosso, playing #00, the goalie, perfectly depicted the sheer overwhelming anxiety felt by #00 before the games.

The Wolves is about far more than soccer. It’s about girlhood, friendship, love, hate, and more. uOttawa’s production was beautiful, powerful, and full of heart.