Review: WOLF PLAY at ACT

Dear Readers, just as theater professionals have unique ways of communicating a story, so too do children have their own ways of communicating their issues, especially when traumatized. Now take those two unique perspectives and combine them and you get the singular "Wolf Play" by Hansol Jung, currently playing at ACT. And it's this unique perspective that explodes this already touching story into an experience not to be missed.

We start off the piece with someone simply known as Wolf (Morgan Gwilym Tso) as he explains that all is not always what it seems. And as we delve deeper, we find that Wolf is simply the protective persona of a young Korean boy who's been run through the foster system. To make matters worse for him, his adoptive father, Peter (Aaron Blakely) has decided that the child is too much for him and his wife and so he arranges a back channel "adoption" (really more of a sale) of the boy to Robin and her partner Ash (Vahishta Vafadari and S. Franco). An arrangement they set up through Yahoo. Upon meeting the boy, Robin and her brother Ryan (Xander DeAngeles) quickly see that the boy is withdrawn and has outbursts of violence. But Peter pushes forth the arrangement until he meets Ash and sees that Robin and Ash are an LGBTQIA+ couple. Now the couple are forced to contend with the boy's emotional issues, issues that only southpaw boxer Ash seems to be able to work through and communicate with him, while Peter regrets his decision to abandon the boy due to the lack of a traditional father in the mix.

A hot bed of issues in the story to be sure. But what makes this piece even more intriguing and powerful, beyond Jung's fresh and engaging writing, is the use of a wooden puppet, operated by Wolf, as the physical being of the young boy. Wolf moves and speaks for him, but we also routinely hear his inner thoughts and his takes on what is happening around him and how a wolf would react. The puppet alone, created by Amanda Villalobos who also made the puppet for the acclaimed Off-Broadway run of the play at MCC Theatre that just closed last month, is a stunning piece of work in how articulate and expressive it is, and how perfectly its look fits into the sadness and isolation of the piece. But then a lot of that credit could also go to Tso who owns the audience from the moment he howls onto stage and embodies the boy with tons of heart and complexity. Their performance alone is reason enough for catching this play.

But the show also offers up powerhouse performances from the rest of the ensemble as superbly directed and staged by Rosa Joshi. Franco delivers a knockout performance (pun intended as they play a boxer). Their arc in the show as they find their own pathways into the boy's heart and in so, open up their own is stunning. Vafadari as the woman who wanted a kid so much she chose to buy one on Yahoo is equally riveting as we see her explore her own reasons for doing this, but also the love she feels for this young boy. DeAngeles as the angry brother manages a wonderful paternal quality and ingratiates himself so with the audience that it makes his eventual betrayal all the more heartbreaking. And the always amazing Blakely brings in a truly broken and misguided man dealing with way too much white privilege.

The play is a stunner with its cast manipulating the audience's emotions like their own personal puppets. And so, with my three-letter rating system, I give "Wolf Play" at ACT a very emotionally manipulated YAY. It's a beautiful and magical reminder how families come in all shapes and sizes, you just need to find your own form of a wolf pack.

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