Nine teenage girls. One patch of green turf. Zero names, only jersey numbers. That’s the entire physical world of The Wolves, and the Asbury Park Theater Company just announced open auditions for what’s shaping up to be one of the most anticipated productions on its upcoming mainstage calendar.
Sarah DeLappe wrote The Wolves as a stage play, not a musical, and it earned a finalist nod for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a genuinely rare distinction for a script built almost entirely around teenagers stretching and talking over each other before soccer practice. The premise sounds deceptively simple on paper. Nine members of a competitive high school girls’ indoor soccer team, referred to throughout the entire show only by their jersey numbers, seven, eleven, forty-six, warm up together across six consecutive Saturday mornings. There’s no elaborate set to speak of, just a stretch of AstroTurf standing in for the entire world these characters inhabit. Everything the audience learns about them comes purely through what they say to each other while stretching hamstrings and juggling orange slices.
What makes the script genuinely difficult, and genuinely exciting for actors, is how these girls actually talk. Conversations overlap constantly, cutting across each other in a rapid-fire, overlapping rhythm that’s been compared more than once to a musical score than to typical stage dialogue. In the span of a single scene, the team might swing from debating the Cambodian genocide straight into high school gossip, then into conversations about periods, sexuality, anxiety, eating disorders, and what any of them actually want out of their futures. It’s messy and unfiltered in exactly the way real teenage conversation actually sounds, which is precisely why the play has resonated so strongly in regional theater across the country. Over the course of those six weeks, a real tragedy hits the team, and the back half of the play watches this group of girls find their collective voice through grief in a way that reshapes how they see each other entirely.
This production marks a genuinely significant milestone for the company itself, since it’s the first mainstage show being staged under newly appointed Producing Artistic Director Nate Patten. Launching a new artistic era with a script this demanding, overlapping dialogue, an entirely female young ensemble, subject matter that doesn’t flinch from real teenage experience, says something about the ambition Patten is bringing to the role right out of the gate. This isn’t a safe, crowd-pleasing choice picked to play it easy in a transition year. It’s a genuine artistic statement.
Open auditions run Monday, August 17, and Tuesday, August 18, from 6:00 to 10:00 PM, with invited callbacks following on Wednesday, August 19. The company is casting a wide net, actively seeking a diverse ensemble drawn from both New Jersey and New York’s regional talent pool, and actors of every background and experience level are encouraged to try out. Here’s a detail worth understanding clearly if you’re on the fence about auditioning. While the characters are written as sixteen and seventeen year olds, adult actors capable of realistically playing late teens are commonly cast in these roles across regional productions of this show, a completely standard practice for material this demanding that benefits from the control and stamina experienced adult performers bring to overlapping, rapid-fire dialogue.
To actually secure an audition slot, you’ll need to register through the official sign-up link found in the Asbury Park Theater Company’s Instagram bio rather than just showing up and hoping for an open spot. Given how tightly scripted the overlapping dialogue in this show is, expect the audition process itself to reflect that structure directly. Directors typically bring small groups of actors together to read directly from the script as an ensemble during the call, testing not just individual line delivery but actual comedic timing and natural chemistry within a group, since this entire play lives or dies on whether nine actors can convincingly sound like a team that’s spent an entire season together.
For anyone who’s ever been part of a team, athletic or otherwise, that talked over each other constantly and somehow still understood one another perfectly, this material should feel less like acting and more like memory. [Your Story Here] The full production runs a limited engagement from September 25 through October 4, giving Asbury Park a genuine, focused window to catch what’s likely to be one of the more emotionally sharp shows on the region’s fall theater calendar. Anyone considering trying out has about two and a half weeks to register before those August audition dates arrive, and given the strength of this script and the significance of it launching a new artistic chapter for the company, this is exactly the kind of opportunity worth clearing a calendar for.
