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This is Will Call, #62—We travel this episode to somewhere in the Midwest to meet high school women’s soccer team The Wolves. Rather we’ll speak with Misha Chowdhury, who directs this Williams Theatre Department staging of Sarah DeLappe’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize Finalist play, The Wolves, which runs Nov 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 18 on the CenterStage.
The Wolves
Nov 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 18; 7:30 p.m.
CenterStage, ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance
1000 Main St, Williamstown, Mass.
Get Tickets: $3
We also chatted, separately, with cast members Caroline Fairweather and Isabel Ouweleen who discuss the process of melding into the characters as they simultaneously developed skills of the sport needed to perform these roles believably.
And in a particularly good bit of luck, we got to bring Rob Livingstone into our conversation with Misha—as Head Strength and Conditioning Coach for Williams College Athletics, and with plenty of High School sports experience to draw on, Rob contributes some keen insights to the subject of team dynamics.
Because, although this show is set during soccer practice, the audience will quickly discover that the fast traveling conversation between high-energy, competitive characters is where the action really is. The hyper-realistic script is the playing field upon which the players kick around subjects breezy or painful, thoughtful or frivolous, often with cringe-worthy authenticity.
In order to be sure to give our guests as much of this hour as possible, I’ll only be joining in the discussion when absolutely necessary for a little context here and there. If we have a little time at the end, we’ll spin another track off Long Journey’s 2017 release, Fierce Folk,” which I can never get enough of. And for those of you who adore live local music, which is pretty much all of you, I’m happy to share the news that Long Journey’s Karl Mullen both performs at, and curates all the local local music that will be playing all day in North Adams on November 18 at Greylock Works event “Festive” or maybe Festeeve, I haven’t heard it pronounced yet…whatever the pronunciation, it’s a celebration of local food and design presented to the sounds of Long Journey, Sarah McNair, Norm Burdick, Rachel Laitman, Izzy Heltai, and Quincy. You can get all the details HERE.
The Wolves
The Williams Theatre Department is proud to present Sarah DeLappe’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize Finalist play, The Wolves. Somewhere in suburban America, a girls’ soccer team dribbles and scrimmages, their voices echoing off the high ceiling. They are claiming territory, cleats digging into the AstroTurf. This play is a shout; an all-female cast navigates the pitfalls and ferocious possibilities of adolescent womanhood. How do we speak our world into being? Director Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Arthur Levitt, Jr. ’52 Artist-in-Residence, transforms the CenterStage into an indoor soccer field, with scenic design by John Rodriguez (Williams class of ’18 ) and lighting design by Abigail Hoke Brady. A post-performance “Talk Back” with the director will be held on Saturday, November 11 and will also include Williams faculty members Kathryn Kent, Professor and Chair of English and Christina Simko, Assistant Professor of Sociology.
Shayok Misha Chowdhury is a queer Bengali director and writer based in New York City. He is co-founder of the Lonely Painter Project, an interdisciplinary collaborative which looks to performance as the art of embodied inquiry. His work has been or is currently being developed at Soho Rep, Ars Nova, New York Theatre Workshop, SPACE on Ryder Farm, HERE Arts Center, the New York Musical Festival, the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, and the CATWALK institute. A Kundiman Fellow and recipient of awards from Fulbright and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Misha’s writing has been published in The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Portland Review, Asian American Literary Review, Lantern Review, and elsewhere. He has co-authored four musicals with composer Laura Grill Jaye and was a vocalist on the Grammy-winning album Calling All Dawns. Misha has been a visiting artist at Stanford, Fordham, and Syracuse, and is currently a New York Theatre Workshop 2050 Fellow and the Levitt Artist-in-Residence at Williams College. MFA: Columbia University. www.shayokmishachowdhury.com
The Wolves cast:
Isabel Benjamin ’19
Valeria Baltodano ‘20
Maia Czaikowski ’20
Caroline Fairweather ’20
Maya Jasinska ’21
Julia Joyce-Barry*
Evelyn Mahon ’18
Isabel Ouweleen ’21
Julia Tucher ’21
Harriet Weldon ’19
