At one point in Wolf Play, the lupine title character, who serves as narrator while embodying different species and objects—more about that in a moment—essentially asks the audience members if they’re sure they want to stick around for the ending. A high-stakes battle is upon us, and the results could be—and will be—devastating. But as the clever wolf surely knows, one of the big differences between having your heart broken in life and having it broken through art is that the latter is almost always worth it.
In fact, one of the marvels of this one-act play by the South Korean writer and translator Hansol Jung, now having its COVID-delayed New York premiere under Dustin Wills’s vigorous direction, is that it manages to be so shattering while eschewing naturalism. The fourth wall is knocked down immediately and abruptly, when Mitchell Winter, the sly, commanding actor cast as Wolf, leaps out of a trap door, insisting that he is neither a performer nor a human being—then admitting he is both, sort of. “The truth is a wobbly thing,” he explains, and indeed, we soon learn that this “lone wolf,” an orphaned animal, represents a six-year-old Asian boy, Jeenu, with Winter maneuvering a skinny-limbed puppet. Jeenu belongs to a mercifully small but nonetheless horrifying percentage of international adoptees who are “rehomed”—that is, given away by couples like Myka and James Stauffer, the YouTube narcissists who gained infamy a few years back by making a Chinese boy their son and promotional object before deciding that his autism was too taxing.
It’s while surfing Yahoo that Robin, a lesbian, finds Jeenu and decides to bring him home to raise with her non-binary spouse, Ash. The couple that originally adopted the boy wound up having their own biological child, and apparently couldn’t juggle warming bottles with caring for an older tyke. We meet the husband, Peter, when he drops Jeenu off at his new home like a piece of furniture, introducing him as “Pete Junior.” “You must think I’m an animal,” Peter says, demeaning wolves and other mammals who cherish and protect their young.
Jung is ultimately less interested in judgment, though, than in exploration. Having Jeenu find refuge in a non-traditional setting was not a random choice for the playwright, who was influenced by the notion of chosen families in the queer community—how marginalized people find loving support when they are denied it in the usual places. Ash is initially wary, to put it mildly, of taking Jeenu in; Robin is the one with the maternal yearnings, and the attendant anxiety, both captured in Nicole Villamil’s lovely, fraught portrayal. “I can’t develop an attachment to someone just coz he lives in my house now,” Ash tells her. “I’ve barely developed an attachment to myself.”
But some of Wolf Play‘s most piercing pleasures arise from watching Ash, played with utterly unfussy conviction by Esco Jouléy, bond with the curious, terrified child who shields himself behind a fiercer identity. In one of several scenes in which Jeenu and Ash share breakfast cereal, Winter and Jouléy sit on opposite sides of a table—one of several simple set pieces and props that scenic designer You Shin-Chen has the actors drag on and off Soho Rep’s intimate performing space—Winter enables the puppet to mirror Ash’s movements as they read, silently reflecting the affection that Jeenu is feeling for his reluctant new caretaker as both start to let down the guards they’ve been forced to construct.
Alas, danger still looms—in the tortured Peter, whose mix of wolfish and sheepish instincts, expressed in Aubie Merrylees’s adroit performance, prove far too human; and in Robin’s brother, Ryan, a nice enough fellow who simply never learned to take responsibility for his own needs or to consider other people’s, a conundrum that Brandon Mendez Homer evokes with impressive nuance. Ironically, Peter worries about the lack of a male role model in Jeenu’s life, even as it becomes increasingly clear that the boy needs a man—or one of these men, in any case—like a wolf needs a bicycle.
Jung nonetheless extends empathy to all of her characters, and infuses Wolf Play with wry humor and ebullient flourishes. Blue balloons are a prominent feature of the bare-bones set; Robin blows up a bunch in preparation for Jeenu’s arrival, and we eventually worry about if and how they will burst, figuratively speaking. I nearly slipped on one while leaving the theater, feeling gutted but also strangely exhilarated—grateful for the family members I was given and those I’ve acquired, and for how relatively little I’ve struggled in holding on to both kinds.
Wolf Play opened February 14, 2022, at Soho Rep and runs through March 20. Tickets and information: sohorep.org
