Dragon Bait Productions Presents "Wolf Cub”

Running September 21st to October 13, Friday & Saturday at 8pm.

McCadden Place Theatre, 1157 North McCadden Place, Hollywood, CA 90038

“Wolf Cub,” written by prolific English playwright and director Che Walker, makes its Los Angeles debut…and what a debut it is. 

The play is performed as a one-woman show and documents the strange and poetic life of Maxine, a woman raised almost feral by an abusive, violent father in the wilds of the American south.  During a pivotal moment in her fear-riddled life she watches a wolf give birth to a cub in the woods and creates a deep connection to it, her burgeoning personality aligning permanently with the cub in a kind of creation story to her own mythology.  Whether this encounter is dream or reality matters not, Maxine choses her familiar and the power of that kindred creature drives her life choices from then on.

Maxine’s journey through the world as she grows is littered with men making bad decisions on her behalf, but to her fear-thickened skin, the repercussion of those epic fails bounce off her like rain.  Relocated to Los Angeles,her father works on drilling rigs and she attends high school.  But her instincts are too wild to be contained and she soon takes up with a local drug dealer and enters the explosive world of the drug gangs in 80s L.A.

Her boyfriend steals from the wrong guy and takes off, leaving her to face his crimes.  It is at this point that Maxine truly takes control of her life, embraces her psychosis, kills her father, becomes a legend in the terrifying underworld of drugs, Iran-Contra and the evolving crack industry.

 Devin Ketko 

The stage is totally bare.  Maxine paces and writhes and mesmerizes with her sinewy lycanthropic body.  Devin Ketko manages to imbue her character with a vivid fearless grace as she recounts her life like an ancient storyteller reenacting a tragic fable, or a tribal explanation of how the world began.  It’s an awful lot to be responsible for, this allegory, but Devin is a powerful and striking actress and seems to revel in it.

This is not an easy play to explain.  It’s part myth, part heartbreaking parable, part wild ride.  It’s the story of a women told in her own language directly from her own damaged mind, aching heart and her deepest darkest instincts.  The more she speaks to us the more I believed she was speaking to the wolf cub.  Longing for a life she could have had, if her mother hadn’t left, if her father wasn’t a violent drunk, if she had stayed in the woods with the wolf.  Even when she does take control it’s in a world that could never really be hers and for a time that was always destined to end, quickly and violently and utterly.  But it is the careening inevitability of all of that which ultimately saves her, which sets her free.

All this is so beautifully told by one woman on a bare and dimly lit stage with the help of a few pieces of music, her sheer raw nerve and an obvious and deep connection to the story.  “Wolf Cub” is weird and wonderful, deeply moving and oddly uplifting.  It is a poem inside a punch inside a crack in the world and I think it’s absolutely brilliant.

The run is very short and I urge you to sit in the dark with Maxine, you won't regret it.

Running September 21st to October 13, Friday & Saturday at 8pm.

McCadden Place Theatre, 1157 North McCadden Place, Hollywood, CA 90038

https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/3568155

STARRING: Devin Ketko as “Maxine”

PRODUCTION TEAM:

Production by playwright Che Walker

Produced by Dragon Bait Productions 

Executive Producer Montana Roesch

Director Che Walker

Publicity by Sandra Kuker PR