Wolves: A Metaphor for Love

Wolves is a play about 30-year old angst in New York City that grows into a play about 40-year old angst in New York City. It transforms from a play about growing up to a play about growing old. But it's a transformation with some rough patches.

Wolves opens with a couple driving home from a party. We can tell that Caleb (Josh Tyson) and Kay (Elizabeth Davis)'s relationship is on the rocks from their stifled car conversation. Flashbacks between them in the car and the party help fill in the gaps. Caleb is a former college football kicker who is now an unemployed writer. Delaney Britt Brewer's script doesn't reveal what Kay does for a living, but her elitist breeding comes across in the insecurities that Caleb expresses to Kay's friends during the party. "Where did you go to school?" Roslyn (Sarah Baskin) asks him. "Just a lower state school. One step up from a community college...One step down from KFC." Needless to say, Kay doesn't appreciate this self-deprecation, and confides to Ros that she's turning into her mother, with a permanent frown plastered to her face. In the midst of all this, Caleb gets hit on by a twenty-one year old who encourages him to take ecstasy. Back on the drive home, the combination of drugs and repressed emotions causes Caleb to hit a wolf. A debate ensues as to whether or not they should kill the wolf. Kay wants them to kill the wolf cause it's in pain, while Caleb can't bear the thought of killing a creature with "love in its eyes." The disagreement leads them to confront their own love for each other. (The wolf is a metaphor for love--get it?)

As you may have guessed, the wolf metaphor continues throughout the play's three (short) acts. In the second act, our attention shifts to Julie and her brother Elliot as they wait to throw their mothers' ashes to the wind. Julie is struggling with a recently ended relationship with Sasha, a woman who now "wants a family," who is now with the Caleb of the previous act. A hallucination involving a wolf suggests that she is afraid of love. The third act shifts back to Caleb--now with Sasha. They have a daughter named Wolf, through whom they speak to each other. This section is the most originally thought out. Wolf sits on a spinnable miniature house and reads out loud from pieces of paper that represent notes that Sasha and Caleb have supposedly written to each other. Unfortunately, the wolf metaphor is quite transparent--as are all the characters' feelings. They use elegant, yet improbably sentences to explain their feelings. For example, Caleb compares the phrase "I love you" to wall paint when he confronts Kay.

Staged in the intimate, 56-seat Theater C at 59e59, a major advantage is that there are only good seats in the house. However, the close-up look also magnifies the fact that Wolves takes on slightly more than it can chew. It could have done without the middle act. Neither Elliot nor Julie's characters are given enough time to develop. In fact, Brewer seems to take a shortcut by devoting a large portion of Julie's time to a hallucinatory scene. At the same time, I'd rather see a relatively obvious play than a willfully obscure one.