This 10-character play takes 90 minutes to tell of a group of young women preparing for games of indoor soccer over a series of weeks - and as it does so, we get insights into their hopes, fears, how they entertain each other, their jealousies, their understandings of the world and how they hold together in the face of disaster. It's an exraordinary production in a number of ways, starting with the credits - in the entire production team, there's only one man (Mandela Mathia, the actress's soccer coach) - otherwise it's all women. It's relentlessly physical as the pre-game rituals include continuous drills, stretches and training for the offstage games. The setting, largely astroturf with a few benches and a set of soccer nets between the audience and the actors (as, after all, these are actors, not trained soccer players, and a ball accidentally propelled towards the audience could prove disastrous), keeps everything focussed on the nine actresses in the team. Dialogue is naturalistic and frequently overlapping, as the girls muse on everything from their hopes for soccer progression to history and op culture trivia. And we get to know the seperate personalities, from the driven captain, #25 (Brenna Harding), to the sarcastic star striker #7 (Cece Peters) to the new girl in the team, #46 (Nikita Waldron).
I find it difficult to explain quite what I loved about this play except, perhaps, for the relentless energy and engaging nature of the cast, the deceptive simplicity of Sarah DeLappe's script and Jessica Arthur's direction, the chance to watch a number of actresses at the dawn of their career getting great meaty roles to bite into, the chance to catch a new play that celebrates and engages deeply in young women in a way I haven't seen in theatre in a while, and one that makes their perspective absolutely central. It's an extrordinary evening in the theatre.
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