“Though it excels in its engagement of the abstract, ‘Wolf Play’ remains grounded in a cruel reality.”
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“Both times I’ve seen ‘Wolf Play,’ at Soho Rep and MCC, I’ve felt out of breath by the end. Why? It tells you it’s fiction right away and keeps reminding you about that throughout, but instead of distancing you from the action, the gesture keeps you close.”
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“An extended magic-of-imagination opening monologue, spoken by Winter, the puppeteer, doesn’t quite work, but the rest of the piercing drama covers an astonishing amount of ground, carrying itself lightly when the terrain is most difficult.”
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“ ‘Wolf Play’ may touch upon hot-button issues, but it does so in ways that are both formally playful and emotionally stirring.”
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“Jung’s piece is as fun, playful, theatrical and funny as it is troubling and exposing...‘Wolf Play’ hits hard and breaks your heart for each character and what they’re struggling for and reminds you that the fantastical world the play has created around you may be ‘not what you think you see’ but ‘exactly what you think you see’ at the same time.”
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"The miracle is how playwright Hansol Jung and director Dustin Wills rattle our emotions and pierce our hearts even as they remind us, regularly and often flamboyantly, that they’re spinning a fictional tale."
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At the center of Jung’s play is a six-year-old Korean-born adoptee named Jeenu, who announces himself to the audience as “a wolf.” Jeenu is played by a puppet, operated by a voracious Mitchell Winter who translates the child’s wolf-like logic and observations to the audience. Needless to say, Jeenu’s family story elicits an ethical and emotional conundrum. Jung’s script crumbles the fourth wall, and director Dustin Wills’s Brechtian staging further eviscerates it in a habitat discombobulated from reality. It’s a space-time continuum, shared by the characters and audience, where the wolf’s opening monologue reminds the audience of the artifice yet allows them to be emotionally reeled in.
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"Performances from the ensemble are uniformly strong and suited to the production’s intimate scale...But casting a wolf as a protagonist becomes a tricky gesture when expressing inner feelings is limited to encyclopedic facts about the species...Wills’s production has the exuberant restlessness of a crayon drawing tacked to the fridge, chaotic but underlaid with a careful internal logic."
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