This is a great play. The plot is based on a true story first published by Reuters, titled The Child Exchange, which detailed events involving US citizens using the internet to abandon children adopted from overseas.
The story here involves Ash, a boxer, on the verge of a pro debut fight and in a relationship with Robin, who has agreed to adopt a six-year-old Korean boy she saw ‘advertised’ on the internet. The boy's original adoptive father, Peter, tries to regain guardianship – especially when he comes to realise the boy will have no ‘dad’ figure in his life.
Caught in the middle, the boy lives through his experiences as a lone wolf looking for a family connection. The play ends with a tense courtroom battle for legal guardianship, which ends with neither side winning the fight; the child turns his back on both parties feeling he's being neither seen nor heard.
Often funny, sometimes disturbing, Wolf Play's dramatic techniques play an intrinsic role. Wolf is part-narrator, part-puppeteer of the doll used to represent the child throughout, and also part of the child himself as he relies on Wolf to voice his thoughts. There's also monologue, breaking the fourth wall, use of shadow imagery and the symbolism of the boxing ring – the bell signifying the end of rounds in the fight – which all bring real impact to the play, and could prove interesting to students when looking at set design and dramatic techniques.
The roles, consisting of two female, two male and the wolf, are all meaty parts, offering actors the chance to show a range of complex emotions and thoughtful communications between characters, with some great passages for solo and small-group performance. I would say the play as a whole may be challenging to perform at secondary level, as the technical complexities may prove difficult in practice, and also there are some tricky lines near the end of the play where, during a courtroom scene, legal terms get jumbled into nonsense words, which requires quite a high level of script-reading skill to master effectively. Again, this is a great technique to study, and if the play is to be used as a whole for performance, any complexities can be worked around.