Athletes Push Comfort Zone by Taking the Stage

Spring Play Features Soccer Players Turned Actors

How do you convince students who have never acted before to step on stage? If you are Julia Ohm, the chair of Cushing’s Performing Arts Department, you stage a play about a girls’ soccer team and recruit diehard athletes to participate.

The vehicle for this effort last spring was The Wolves, written by Sarah DeLappe, which premiered off-Broadway in 2016. It follows the players through pregame warmups week after week and was staged in Cushing’s Heslin Gymnasium. “I went after not only actors but also athletes because there’s a believability factor with every play. Many of these performers were soccer girls, girls that play sports all the time,” Ohm says. “I thought it might draw people to the theater, might add something new to the season, might get us all out of our box metaphorically — but also out of the pandemic ‘box’ that we’ve been trapped in for so long — which is always good, creatively.”

In this setting the audience and the actors were on the same level. Being eye-to-eye provided an intimacy that made the play’s tough issues — global politics, social anxiety, eating disorders, tragedy — even more powerful. “I always promised [the actors] that the theater is going to change their life,” Ohm says. “That’s a really big thing to throw down, but I think for them, stepping outside of their comfort zone and delving into this work the way they did, did just that.”