Ninth week!

A Look Inside The Wolves with Kaelyn Rothe | A Series of Speculative & Intellectual Inquiries | Senior Spotlight | Several Weeks before Late Night Breakfast, Carls Perform the “Primal Scream”

A Look Inside The Wolves with Kaelyn Rothe

One of our lovely co-editors of the SLM, Kaelyn Rothe, was in the Carleton Players production a few weeks ago. In this article, she talks about the play, the process, and what drives her love for theater.

A few weeks ago, the Carleton Theater department put on The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe. It tells the fictional story of nine girls on a high school soccer team, the Wolves, who have been playing together since they were kids. The play takes place in 2015. Kaelyn Rothe, a junior double major in English and Theater Arts (and by crazy coincidence, also an editor of the Miscellany???), was a part of the cast. When describing the show, she compared it to a quote from the smash hit tv show Riverdale, saying that the show depicts the “epic highs and lows of high school soccer.” The play follows these nine girls across six weeks of practices before games while they figure out their lives, their college prospects, and most importantly, their friendships. Kaelyn describes the play as all about them “trying to find their own identities as they grow up and navigate that liminal space between childhood and adulthood… There’s this quote from Gertrude Stein that I love at the beginning of the script. ‘We are always the same age inside’… I think it encapsulates what this play is like quite well.”

The rehearsal process for The Wolves was quite intense. Since the show is such an ensemble piece—every character is in every scene at almost all times—all actors were called for every possible rehearsal time. There were 4-hour rehearsal windows 4 days a week with one 6-hour rehearsal window on Sundays. This accumulated to 22 hours a week for 7 weeks, but when asked if this was ever too much, Kaelyn said no. “I’ve been in a show almost every term I’ve been on campus, so I’m used to it. I think my life would be empty without it… I vividly remember our 10-minute breaks during tech week, I’d be quickly revising my essays backstage. Weirdly, I think it’s how I work best.” In addition to this already intense rehearsal schedule, due to the subject matter of the play, the entire show consists of the characters doing this same ritualistic warm-up before their soccer games. So, for the actors, Kaelyn says it was essentially “90 minutes of straight cardio. I worked out so much that my muscles feel different now—I guess in a good way, but I’m quite a reluctantly fit person.”

When talking about the text of The Wolves, Kaelyn says that “the arc the characters go on is really interesting. We sort of are introduced to them going about their everyday lives and conversations at these practices and as the weeks go on, we are progressively building this tension that could snap at any moment and then after this boiling point, there’s quiet.” She Kaelyn notes that this quiet at the end of the play is felt so thoroughly by the audience, especially because the dialogue in the play is so fast and overlapping that there is barely ever a second of silence. There are constantly multiple conversations happening at the same time that are “so accurate to how a teenage girl speaks—it shows these girls are so comfortable with each other, there is no silence between them.” Yet, at the end “there is so much silence. The space we used to take up is suddenly removed and the audience is made to question why. It becomes a really powerful space.”

Funnily enough, even though the show is all about navigating that space in between childhood and adulthood and finding your own identity within that, none of the characters in the show have names. They are simply known by numbers—Kaelyn, for example, played #11. “#11 is amazing, I’m obsessed with her. She says the most out-of-pocket shit… This show at its heart, while it is a drama, is rooted in comedy and in the ridiculous things we say when we are trying to figure out who we want to be, it’s wonderful.” Kaelyn describes #11 as someone who keeps herself informed on so many topics so she can be that person in the room with all of the answers and she uses that knowledge sort of as power. Ironically though, for a character who talks so much about things that have nothing to do with her, Kaelyn says that her “most-said line is probably ‘I don’t want to talk about.’ She wants to win every conversation, but she wants to have conversations on her own terms.” 

This kind of character exploration that comes with acting is one of the reasons Kaelyn loves theater, she is “obsessed with acting… even the tiniest bit of dialogue is important. You have to know exactly what you’re saying and why you’re saying it or the audience won’t know either. It’s the same with Shakespeare—you have to decode the message behind the text… And while The Wolves is not Shakespeare, I like it just as much.” We at The Miscellany can safely determine this means she is really passionate about both. She also loves theater because it is such a collaborative experience. “You’re working with the other actors, the director, the designers, the crew, everyone has to work together to create this thing. It’s such a beautiful thing to work with someone else to make art, to make something that affects another person, that affects me… I cried at the end of every show, it was so emotionally powerful. So everybody did unfortunately see me sobbing my eyes out but weirdly, that’s a part of why I love theater. It’s wonderful to create something so temporary—it’s just for us in that room.”

A Series of Speculative & Intellectual Inquiries

We ask, professors answer.

Our question of the week is: If you had to take a class outside of English, what subject or class would you love to take?

Pierre Hecker: Astrophysics. I hear they’re doubling down on their heliocentric lies with stuff like “extragalactic astronomy.” LOL, like that’s a thing. Someone needs to stand up for the celestial spheres. 

Gregory Hewett: Rock climbing. Because one should learn what one fears most. That, or Intro to Physics.

Michael Kowalewski: I’ve sat in on Andy Flory’s “Rock Lab” already, so probably Dave Lefkowitz’s “Obs Draw” (my son Kevin loved that course when he was a student here) or George Vrtis’ “American Environmental History.”  But I’d probably end up on a wait list.

Adriana Estill: Sooooo many! This spring I would take Meredith McCoy’s Indigenous Chicago, Candace Moores’s Cult TV and Fan Cultures, and Jay McKinney’s Embodied Cognition. I so wish I had been able to take Palmar Álvare’z-Blanco’s Death and Dying Under Capitalism class this term! In general, the titles and descriptions of Classics, SOAN, and  AFST classes always interest me.

Gwen Kirby: When I was a Carleton student, I totally surprised myself by falling in love with Latin American history (all thanks to awesome prof Andrew Fisher!). I’ve loved studying history ever since and I’d love to take a class on the English civil wars and just to mix it up, a ceramics class! Also a class on pre-code Hollywood? And maybe a dance class? Oh, let’s be real, I want to take classes on pretty much everything.

Peter Balaam: I’m interested these days in what it means to be in a world—so I’d sign up for Julia Strand’s PSYC 220: Sensation & Perception.

Thank you, professors! You’ve delivered amazing answers to the SLM as always.

Senior Spotlight: Holly Lake and Elinor Rees-Hill

For this week’s Senior Spotlight, we interviewed one Holly Lake and one Elinor Rees-Hill. They talk comps, post-Carleton plans, things on their Carleton bucket lists, and bits of advice any current or prospective English major absolutely needs to know. We have so elegantly and beautifully and terrifically sorted their answers by topic for your reading convenience. This has nothing to do with the fact that it is ninth week.

Comps

Holly: I’m doing the Creative Writing option. It’s a fiction piece: girl post-breakup, re-finding herself and how her life is after this breakup. I wrote a short story on my study abroad in London last spring and that was the first time I didn’t feel like a piece was done; I wanted to keep writing it.

Elinor:

I’m doing the Research Comps. It’s a look at a contemporary memoir called In the Dream House [by Carmen Maria Machado] through a Gothic lens. [I am] taking the trope of the cloister heroine and looking at how different systems of oppression manifest in architecture… in our contemporary United States, and how [such oppressive] forces work to mislead and attract people.

Post-Carleton English-Major Plans

Holly: I am hoping to work at Carleton . . . in either Alumni Relations or Admissions. I’ve worked in Alumni Relations since freshman year, so that’s what I would love to do. And [my plan is to] keep writing and reading… even if I don’t have to for a class.

Elinor: There’s a part of me that’s interested in a PhD. But, in terms of making smart decisions financially and in terms of job security, I’m not fully sure I’m ready to commit to that. I also think it would be really fun to work at a bookstore immediately after graduation.

1 Thing You Have Not Yet Done and Still Need to Do Before June 15th

Holly: I’ve never gone floating down the Cannon and I’m a little scared of what’s in the Cannon River. But, I would, in theory, want to go floating down the Cannon River.

Elinor: Well, I have floated down the Cannon River and I survived… I’ve never made it all the way through Sproncert without going back to my room for a second to take a break, so I really want to marathon it this year.

Advice

Holly: Don’t be too prideful. Go to the writing center.

Elinor: Read for fun.

Thank you, Holly and Elinor! 

Several Weeks before Late Night Breakfast, Carls Perform the “Primal Scream”

Arnab Chakladar is responsible. 

On February 20th, 2025, if students missed the usual gentle tolling of the chapel’s midday bells and instead shivered at the echo of wild screams, they can thank Arnab Chakladar. His class Imperial Adventures held its annual “Tarzan Yell Contest.”

The class explores the literary ancestors to Indiana Jones, tracing back through “the wilds of Afghanistan, the African forest, a prehistoric world in Patagonia, the opium dens of mysterious exotic London,” as Arnab promises on the course catalog, and of course, they read “Tarzan” too. Tarzan is one of the most celebrated fictional characters, popular book series and adapted series out there. Central to any reproduction of Tarzan, Screen Rant notes, is “the iconic Tarzan yell” featured in the original 1932 film. Did the students of Imperial Adventures do it justice?

“The contest was simple: embrace your primal rage in a feral cry to be heard echoing across campus.” Inigo Hare, winner of the “revisionist yell,” describes the event. Students competed in 4 categories of yells: solo canonical, group canonical, solo revisionist and group revisionist. “Canonical screams were scored based on accuracy and decibel level. To come out on top, one had to study Tarzan yells from existing media extensively,” Inigo shares. “ For revisionist screams, the rules were looser. Part of the fun here was the creativity, coming up with unique ways to channel the ape-man’s fearsome cry.”

“Each category had 4 or so participants, and the judging panel consisted of 3 professors from the English department. When it was each person’s turn to yell, they climbed up to the second landing of the stairs to do so.” Inigo explains, “We all gathered in the hallway, to disturb other classes as much as possible.”

Inigo says that his favorite moment of the contest was his classmate Adam’s revisionist yell. “He dressed up in a suit and tie, before explaining that his yell would imagine what it would sound like if Tarzan existed in modern polite society. He then let out a very subdued, very quick, ‘rahh’” he recalls.

Arnab himself refers to the contest as a “momentous event.”