There’s a recurring comedic device in Yale Rep’s season opener, falcon girls, which follows six teen girls competing in Future Farmers of America events in prairieland Colorado. The girls preen, pose and perform coordinated dance moves to songs by En Vogue or Salt-N-Pepa—it’s 1995, and this is their period-accurate fantasy of feminine empowerment—until the music stops, the lights come up and the girls, now mid-competition as a team of horse evaluators, are nervously holding their clipboards, preparing sober oral assessments of equine conformation, balance and structural correctness.
Humbler though the reality may be, we can see that the unseen horses channel the girls’ sense of worth in their own and each other’s eyes. What’s more, they aren’t just competing and collaborating at FFA events but also to get away from their parents, find boyfriends and hone their wardrobes, their musical tastes, their access to R-rated movies. At one point, Hilary, the team newcomer played with guileless yearning by Gabrielle Policano, is challenged by the other girls to demonstrate her skills by judging their physical features in the parlance of horse evaluation, to predictably undiplomatic results. April (Alexa Lopez), for her part, hopes a Greyhound bus will eventually take her to Hollywood, where she can marry Neil Patrick Harris—another reminder it’s 1995.
The recognizable armature of the play, based on the playwright Hilary Bettis’s recollections of her own FFA girlhood, is the ragtag underdog team’s quest to unseat the rich girls, in this case the team representing Peyton, 10 windy miles up the road. The play’s conflict, however, is not in the contest—the play-by-play of the horse evaluation event is only glancingly dramatized—but rather the knife’s edge of teen social relations.
Hilary, who just arrived in town with her single mother, joins the team as an “alternate to the alternate,” the underdog to the underdogs. Carly (Alyssa Marek), the first alternate, offers a side-eyed warning: “You know there’s, like, zero chance you’ll ever go in. You have to murder me first. Do you want to be a murderer?... Just so you know, it’s basically impossible, like, don’t get your hopes up. Just so you know.” The six girls are played by young adults with BFAs and established theater credentials, but they dive right in to enact a recognizably experience-hungry adolescence, finding the springy motions and hair-trigger emotions, the slights and slut-shaming that mask curiosity and fear, the fierce camaraderie to be found in shared secrets.
The music of the play comes via quiet, halting disclosures and explosions of non-negotiable declarations that grow more explosive as the plot inevitably thickens. When Carly quits the team at the behest of her parents, who ostensibly need her help on the farm, she bristles at her teammates’ demand for an explanation. “Horse-judging’s dumb. It’s for little girls. And the sooner you all figure that out and grow up, the happier you will be.” Rebecca (Annie Abramczyk), in turn, imposes a social death sentence. “If you see [Carly], don’t talk to her,” she says to the others. “Don’t even make eye contact.”
In a scene that opens the second half, after a flurry of such recriminations sends the remaining teammates into their five bedrooms—different spaces on the minimal set—they chain-call each other using period-accurate corded phones. A cleverly staged, almost-choral recitation ensues, with vehement refrains of “Don’t hang up!” as one girl uses call waiting to get another on the phone.
The volatility and moodiness of the characters provides plenty of safe drama. The real danger concerns whether or not the girls will find a safe path to maturity. Bettis’s dialogue humorously and also harrowingly reenacts a decade of escalating sexual precocity for teenage girls, abetted by Cosmo quizzes and blockbuster movies in which Drew Barrymore and Alicia Silverstone seduce grown men. Jasmine (effectively played in the performance by understudy Gabriela Veciana) talks dirty on the phone to a stranger she met in an AOL chat room. Carly visits Mr. K., the girls’ FFA coach, played with genial sagacity by Teddy Cañez, to tender her resignation, but also to ask if he thinks she’s pretty. (We brace ourselves for the scene to go somewhere dark, but Mr. K’s response is, indeed, genially sagacious.) And the disappearance of a local teenage girl—an event that actually occurred in the town of Falcon in 1991 (and remained under investigation 4 years later)—shadows their every discussion about seeking boys or letting them in.
The fact that deeper, life-altering reasons already lie behind both Hilary’s arrival in the opening minutes and Carly’s withdrawal before the intermission gives the play its anxious beating heart. At 14, their paths to, say, college and a successful career—the promise of FFA competition for girls—can already have been disrupted. As such, the post-competition scenes that take place in the team van—three short rows of chairs in the middle of the stage, with some canny steering wheel-miming from Cañez—represent small moments of victory. The team may or may not have won. They may be in need of Mr. K’s tactful brand of guidance and encouragement. But they had made it to the arena, and there are more arenas to come. It’s not just a testament to the production that the team van, in retreat to Falcon from the latest competition, is clearly moving the girls from Falcon forward.
falcon girls
Yale Repertory Theater - 1120 Chapel St, New Haven (map)
through Nov. 2
(203) 432-1234
www.yalerep.org/productions/falcon-girls
Written by David Zukowski. Photographed by Joan Marcus for Yale Repertory Theatre.
