"Mr. Wolf" Dramatically Closes the Season on the Julianne Argyros Stage

After the applause died down on April 17, First Night of Mr. Wolf, everyone walked quietly out to Ela's Terrace, sharing thoughts about the moving psychological drama by Rajiv Joseph.

Carl Neisser, SCR emeritus trustee and member of the Playwrights Circle (the group of underwriters who helped produce the world premiere), summed up his feelings. "When the first act of this marvelous drama was ending, you could hear a pin drop, because we were all on our chair's edge. Mr. Wolf was one of the best plays in the 51 years I have attended SCR."

During the evening, First Nighters and their guests gathered at tables draped with white linen to sup late night fare by Crème de la Crème. White lights, wrapped around trees and twinkling overhead, created an atmosphere reminiscent of the play's celestial sphere. Soon, the actors and other artists joined the party to accept the playgoers' heartfelt praise, which was echoed through the weekend by reviewers.

"Tears at the fabric of deep emotions—and of the universe." — OC Register

"Joseph's script...possesses a multilayered dimensionality which matches the brilliance of the actors." — LA Splash


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Student By Day, Actor By Night

Tessa Auberjonois, Jon Tenney, Emily James and John de Lancie in Mr. Wolf.

Emily James

By day, Emily Ruth James is just like any other college student: working on final projects for the semester, attending classes and getting ready to graduate. She’s on track to earn a bachelor of fine arts in acting from California State University, Fullerton’s acting program. By night (and on weekends), she’s making her professional stage debut in the world premiere of Mr. Wolf by Rajiv Joseph. While there’s a lot going on for James, she’s up for the challenge and excited to be part of the cast for this SCR-commissioned play. We caught up with her as the play was set to open. 

What drew you to acting?
I was drawn to acting as a kid, but it took me until I was 17 to figure out that’s what I wanted to do. I have always had a big imagination and was always creating my own stories and dramatic worlds as a child. Once it clicked—that I could do this for a living—I never considered any other path.

Who would you say is your mentor—and how has that person helped shape your development as an actor?
My acting teacher at Cal State Fullerton, Svetlana Efremova, has made—and continues to make—a huge impression on my acting. She does not let her students get away with any untruthful acting. She pushes us past what we think we are capable of achieving. It's quite amazing actually; I have no idea where I would be without her.

What have you learned about yourself through working on Mr. Wolf?
The most exciting part about this process is working with the amazing actors of this cast. I'm so lucky to share the stage with these professionals. They have taken me under their wing and helped my process immensely. Never once did I feel like the new kid on the block, and that was huge for me in my exploration during rehearsal. From this process, I have learned to build a reverence for this character. Even if I am feeling wiped out from the week or emotionally disconnected, I know I have to “suck it up” and honor Theresa's story.

It has also taught me to trust myself and Rajiv's BRILLIANT script. Once I can let go of expectations and certain pressures, the creativity starts flowing and the real magic happens.

What have you found the most challenging?

The most challenging thing for me is dealing with the realizations of Theresa's mental state. It was very hard to understand at first. Also, it is hard to conceive her naïveté and the fact that everything is new…and scary…and jarring.

What’s next for you once the play closes?
I plan to jump on the acting wave in Los Angeles and continue to do theatre in the area. I don't know what is next, but I'm very excited to find out!

Buy tickets and learn more about Mr. Wolf, on the Julianne Argyros Stage through May 3.

How the Universe of "Mr. Wolf" Was Formed

Emily James and John de Lancie in Mr. Wolf.  Scenic design by Nephelie Andonyadis.

Nephelie Andonyadis previously designed scenery at SCR for The Summer Moon and The BFG (Big Friendly Giant); costumes for Sideways Stories from Wayside School, Saturn Returns, Emilie, The Importance of Being Earnest, Safe in Hell, The Dazzle; and both costumes and scenery for Relatively Speaking and The Stinky Cheese Man. Andonyadis designs frequently with Cornerstone Theater Company where she is an ensemble member. Her recent projects there include scenic designs for Bliss Point, Café Vida, Flor, The Unrequited (Between Two Worlds), Three Truths, Jason in Eureka, Los Illegals; and California: The Tempest; and costume designs for Plumas Negras, Order My Steps and Boda de Luna Nueva. Her scenic and costume designs at other regional theatres include Intersection for the Arts, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Portland Center Stage, Center Theatre Group, Guthrie Lab, Court Theatre, Chicago Children’s Theatre, Great Lakes Theatre Festival, The Acting Company, Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Idaho Shakespeare Festival, Berkshire Theatre Festival and Yale Repertory Theatre. Andonyadis is a professor in the theatre arts department at the University of Redlands. She is a graduate of Yale University School of Drama and Cornell University School of Architecture, and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group design fellowship.

“…if the universe is infinite, it means there is no end to possibility,” theorizes young Theresa in Rajiv Joseph’s new work, Mr. Wolf. The show runs through May 3 on the Julianne Argyros Stage.

The possibilities on stage can be endless, especially when a designer is tasked with creating the “universe” of a play. How does the space of the stage relate to the story, the characters and the themes? What does the world on stage express to the audience?

Scenic designer Nephelie Andonyadis previously designed scenery and costumes for SCR shows as diverse as Charlotte’s Web and The Motherf**ker with the Hat (sets) and Absurd Person Singular and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (costumes). She has a lot of expertise to draw upon and was thrilled with the opportunity to create the universe of Mr. Wolf.

While she grew up around theatre, Andonyadis began her career in scenic design when she studied architecture as an undergraduate at Cornell University. She was fascinated by how humans relate to the spaces around them. Although, as she delved deeper into architecture, she felt something was missing.

Mr. Wolf set rendering by Nephelie Andonyadis

“Architecture felt too far removed, in material and texture, in space and in time, from my own experience as a young artist,” she recalls. “I missed the poetry of language, the presence of the temporal human dimension, and the impact of movement in the spaces I was designing.”

In short, what was missing was the energy that live theatre exuded. Once Adonyadis completed her undergraduate studies, she moved to New York City and apprenticed in theatre, taking on jobs that gave her the opportunity to learn something new.

“I worked as an assistant scenic designer, a draftsperson, painter, milliner, sculptor, stitcher and learned a great deal about the craft of theatre,” she says. “Then, I went back to school to earn my MFA in design from the Yale School of Drama.”

Happy in her return to theatre, she continued her work in New York. Eventually, she found her way to Southern California where she continues to find inspiration in her designs.

And how does she draw out that inspiration? When tackling the world premiere of Mr. Wolf—and any play she works on—she looks to the language first. The words on every page serve as her creative muse as she begins her design work.

“I look for the patterns that the playwright has embedded in the text in my effort to tease out its structure and discover its physical form,” she explains. “I love tightly structured dialogue and long pauses filled with tension. I am inspired to create spaces in which the action can unfold and the poetry can sing.”

Mr. Wolf set rendering by Nephelie Andonyadis

She met with Founding Artistic Director David Emmes, who is directing Mr. Wolf, and incorporated his feedback. He had a very specific vision that went beyond the needs of multiple locations called for in the script. As Andonyadis recalls, “He had a strong impulse to see the action against an expanse of space. Given the themes of inquiry, infinite love, faith and hope, we explored this sense of space in terms of the deep space of the universe.”

This sense of physical space, in relation to the universe, also is explored on a more human level. As Andonyadis analyzed the themes behind Mr. Wolf, she found an interesting connection between the heart and universe. To her, the play examines the dimensions of the human heart through the idea of deep space, infinity and alternate universes. Taking all this into account, she hopes her work suggests “the interconnectedness of both the expanse of deep space and the deep feelings of the heart” through her design.

As the production approaches its opening night, she’ll continue to fine tune and adjust the design to help reinforce her concepts. During this critical time, she keeps a philosophy in mind.

“I believe that the design must serve the play, this play, here and now. That means that each production and each design is specific to its time and place, to its community of artist-makers and to its audience, to its creators and to our aspirations.”

Learn more and buy tickets.

"Mr. Wolf": A Mystery Unfolds

by John Glore

It begins with the image of a girl’s bare feet rubbing against an old rug.

But a moment later, the peace of that image is obliterated upon the arrival of a second character. His entrance into the opening scene of Rajiv Joseph’s Mr. Wolf, having its world premiere in the Julianne Argyros Stage, sets up a mystery. We learn soon enough that the man is Theodore Wolf … but what is his relationship to the barefoot, 15-year-old girl? He appears to be her caregiver and mentor, yet he also seems to revere her as a disciple would a prophet. She demonstrates an astonishing command of scientific concepts and seems eager to take on the biggest questions of the universe, and yet there’s something vulnerable and ingenuous about her. Those qualities only become more pronounced when Mr. Wolf tells her “The world is coming,” in a way that suggests impending doom. What are they so afraid of … and has it in fact come knocking, when the loud, insistent banging on the front door brings the play’s first scene to an end?

The explanation of that initial mystery comes relatively soon as the story unfolds, but before the play provides any answers it poses new questions, because in the second scene we leave behind Mr. Wolf and the barefoot girl and meet two new characters. Michael and Julie have been brought together by a similar tragedy that has struck each of their lives. Their respective responses to that tragedy are very different: Julie is lost and in despair, while Michael has become resolute about fixing what is broken. He has an almost fanatical belief in and devotion to his cause, and when he offers to fix things for Julie, too, she is suspicious of his motives—but his offer of hope and salvation proves difficult to resist.

How Julie and Michael are connected to the characters in the first scene won’t become clear until the end of the third scene and the beginning of the fourth—and then we meet the last of the play’s five characters, Hana, whose arrival only throws matters further into doubt. Hana has a plan that, if carried out, will overturn everyone’s lives.

If the preceding description seems cryptic, that’s because to give any more information about the initial circumstances of Mr. Wolf would be to deny one of the principal satisfactions of Joseph’s play: solving its puzzles. Mr. Wolf, the barefoot girl, Julie, Michael and Hana are connected by an event that happened long ago, but even as we begin to piece together the connections, we only move deeper into the mysteries of the human heart that are the play’s true subject.

The characters of Mr. Wolf are living in extremis: none of us is likely ever to experience the specific challenges that they face in their lives. But drama often uses the extreme to illuminate the universal, whether in a tragedy such as Oedipus Rex (a man unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother) or a fantastic comedy like A Midsummer Night’s Dream (a man is turned into a donkey and becomes the love interest of the queen of the fairies). Exaggerated circumstances cast a brighter light on human psychology and social values, illuminating aspects of our experience that can be more difficult to discern and understand in the dim light of ordinary daily life.

From beginning to end, Mr. Wolf is a play of questions: Why do we have faith? What happens when the specific act of faith that has completely dominated our life and given it meaning is rewarded beyond our wildest hopes? When the faith that has defined us is no longer necessary—because it has been objectively proven—what then becomes our reason to live?

Or: How do we find hope when faith has been leached out of our hearts? How do we survive in the face of irredeemable loss? Is it better to know the worst has happened, or to continue to be left in the dark indefinitely, clinging to a tiny sliver of hope?

These are some of the questions that the characters in Rajiv Joseph’s play must grapple with; and if the play works as intended, we will grapple with those questions too.

And in the end, all the play’s questions finally point to the one big question every one of us must face at some point in our lives—if not repeatedly: How do we go on?

For one character, the answer may come in prayer; for another, in the solving of a mystery; and for two characters in the final moment of the play, the answer to that question begins to suggest itself when they share the simple pleasure of digging bare toes into a warm fuzzy rug.

And suddenly hope is there.

Rajiv Joseph

Rajiv Joseph has become one of the hottest playwrights in the American theatre since his breakthrough play, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, debuted in Los Angeles in 2009 and moved on to a heralded Broadway run starring Robin Williams. “I’m tempted to call it the most original drama written so far about the Iraq war,” wrote the L.A. Times’ Charles McNulty, “but why sell the work short? The imagination behind it is way too thrillingly genre-busting to be confined within such a limiting category… Bengal Tiger marks the breakthrough of a major new playwriting talent.” The play was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize.

South Coast Repertory commissioned Joseph to write a play for the company prior to the explosive success of Bengal Tiger; but that success meant SCR had to wait a few years for Joseph to fulfill the commission. In the meantime, other commissions and other new plays kept him busy, along with productions of various works at such theatres as off-Broadway’s Second Stage, the Alley Theatre in Houston, Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, D.C., TheatreWorks in the Bay Area and the Dallas Theatre Center.

But Mr. Wolf, the play Joseph finally submitted to fulfill his SCR commission, proved worth the wait. Like Bengal Tiger, Mr. Wolf demonstrates fierce intelligence, bold theatricality and keen psychological insight. It shows Joseph’s willingness to look into dark corners of human experience, as well as his ability to find light in the midst of that darkness.

Shepherding this world premiere production of Mr. Wolf is David Emmes, one of SCR’s two founding artistic directors. Emmes has staged numerous SCR world premieres, including several Amy Freed plays (The Beard of Avon among them) and works by Keith Reddin, Neal Bell and Tom Babe.

The design team for Mr. Wolf comprises Nephelie Andonyadis for sets, Leah Piehl for costumes, Lap Chi Chu for lighting and Cricket Myers for sound. All have multiple SCR credits, and Cricket Myers also designed sound for Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo in both its Los Angeles debut and its Broadway run (earning her a Tony nomination).

The cast includes Tessa Auberjonois, seen at SCR most recently in Absurd Person Singular and Becky Shaw; John DeLancie, an SCR veteran who has multiple television and film credits (including the role of Q in the “Star Trek” franchise); Jon Tenney, who appeared for seven seasons opposite Kyra Sedgwick on the TNT series, “The Closer,” and who made his SCR debut 18 years ago in the world premiere production of Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain; Kwana Martinez, making her SCR debut after numerous appearances at many of the finest theatres in New York and across the country; and Emily James, currently an undergraduate at Cal State Fullerton, also making her SCR debut.

For more information on all the artists involved in Mr. Wolf, click here.

Learn more and buy tickets.