The 2017 Pulitzer Prize-nominated play The Wolves, by American playwright Sarah DeLappe is the fifth and final main stage production this year for Mockingbird Theatrics.

Briefly, The Wolves, with a tight cast of 10 follows nine teenage girls warming up for a Saturday indoor soccer game while talking about the Big Questions. It also features the inevitable soccer mum.

Not content with taking on a group of excited, talented and opinionated young actors, director Chris Baldock has assembled two separate casts that will alternate and respectively perform the first and last performances of the season.

He calls the two groups of actors The Lycans, sort of werewolves, and The Lupins, wolf-headed humanoids from fantasy fiction.

As the play’s title suggests, the name of the team itself is The Wolves, whose lupine qualities emerge in the tight script full of overlapping dialogue.

The script shows the girls conversing on everything from global politics to gossip, their own body images, their coach’s hangover, their ambitions and speculations about the new girl, #46 (none of the girls has a name, they’re all numbered by hashtags).

Baldock’s view is that the play is about identity, about themselves as young women and where they fit in.

An avid collector of new plays, he found the play not long after it was written and thought there weren’t many plays of this quality for young women who talk about life in such an exuberant way.

With its finely-distinguished characters, The Wolves had also received the 2017 OBIE Award For Ensemble Work and Baldock likes it that there are no stars in the show, even though there are some characters who stand out more than others.

“Each character has to be alive in the moment,” he says.

It hasn’t been seen in Canberra before and, given that Canberra Youth Theatre is having a year off from production, he decided to take up the challenge of doing a play with such good parts for teenagers. 

When he auditioned, so many talented Canberrans put their hands up that he felt he needed to double-cast it.

It shows teenagers up as a sharp group and the characters are not inclined to mince words, so that even the “c” word surfaces once, something one of the parents queried, but was eventually happy with. 

“It’s about contemporary adolescent lives of people around 16 to 17 years old. They’re on the cusp of adulthood – some think they already are, but some don’t want to go there,” Baldock says. 

“At first you think they’re going to be cliched characters, but you quickly find out they’re not,” he says in answer to critics who’ve asked him what he would know about female adolescence to direct a play about it. 

The cleverness of the writing is also evident in the topics they cover.

“You might think it first at their cliches but that all gets turned on its head and the depth comes through,” he says.

Baldock admits it took a lot of hard work because of the complexity of the characters, so that they spent the first couple of weeks going through the roles in rehearsals in some depth. 

“Yes, the play is called The Wolves,” he says, “and it’s very appropriate… there’s something primal, something disturbing about this play, but you’ll just have to be there to see what that is.”

The Wolves, Belconnen Arts Centre, October 15-November 1.