When a Girl Becomes a Horse: Review of Yale Rep’s Falcon Girls
THE NEW PLAY IS A LITURGY OF PROVINCIAL GIRLHOOD
A scene from falcon girls by Hilary Bettis, directed by May Adrales. Yale Repertory Theatre, October 10–November 2, 2024. Photo © Joan Marcus
Every morning since I can remember, I wake up and lie to myself. Shifting from one dream to another. What are lies if not merely stories we repeat over and over? Most of our lies are inherited and when we indulge in them so insatiably that they become true enough, we become expert storytellers.
The year in which I learned to lie best is eighth grade soon after arriving in hilly little Naugatuck. Nobody needs the new kid, so you lie. I adopted music that had nothing to do with me, mispronounced my last name, claimed a hiding spot at the gym, I imitated the grimy boys, rejected the smart girls, evaded any evidence of my upbringing overseas, and sometimes broke mirrors to avoid my reflection. My first year of dissociation, my own private trove of lies; seduced by legibility, I lost myself.
One of the aims of Falcon Girls, Hilary Bettis’ new play, a liturgy of provincial girlhood, now world-premiering at the Yale Rep, is to ponder how competition and seclusion inform these lies, the type that become identities, especially for the volatile interactions of middle school girls. Director May Adrales gleefully blends conceit and deceit within this hyper-competitive, ultra-femme realm akin to those of ballet, beauty pageants, and cheerleading. But swap the couture for corduroy blazers, the glitz for tedium. The competitors in Falcon Girls are eighth-grade girls haunted by succeeding in the horse judging competitions hosted by the Future Farmers of America (FFA), a veritable prize for their otherwise sleepy ranching community in mid-nineties Colorado.
Gabrielle Policano, Annie Abramczyk, Alexa Lopez, and Sophia Marcelle in a scene from falcon girls by Hilary Bettis, directed by May Adrales. Yale Repertory Theatre, October 10–November 2, 2024. Photo © Joan Marcus
Hilary (Gabrielle Policano), donning a teddy bear sweater and a dubious past, is the newest arrival in Mr. K’s (Teddy Cañez) horse evaluation class. Her mere introduction becomes a blight on the land of April (Alexa Lopez), Carly (Alyssa Marek), Jasmine (Sophia Marcelle), Mary (Anna Roman), and Rebecca (Annie Abramczyk), staunch terrors giddy to peg Ms. Littlest Pet Shop as the class’ weakest link. Flaunting an easy scorn to Hilary’s equine naïvete, they dispute her ethnicity in the school hallways and force her to confess her chastity (a later grim scene reveals that the real reason she moved into town concerns a terminated pregnancy following sexual assault arranged by her best friend). “There’s zero chance you’ll ever get in,” Carly, the team’s understudy, warns Hilary, now the understudy’s understudy, “You have to murder me first. Do you want to be a murderer?”
The girls excuse their cruelty as meticulousness, a requisite in ensuring standards, how else are they to reach nationals? They speak of their FFA aspirations as zero-sum games. With a play that relies on adolescence—such a heightened tragicomic mode of melo-trauma—we expect this kind of existential urgency to color its fixation on success, but characters are distinctly relatable when even success won’t bring them fulfillment.
Even if they were to triumph at the national FFA stage, it’s clear that Jasmine’s online boyfriend wouldn't materialize, April’s father wouldn’t stop tormenting their home, Rebecca’s mom would remain unyielding in her perfectionism, Carly would still have to marry her boyfriend before birthing their child, Mary wouldn’t become any holier, and Hilary’s mom would remain unwittingly distant.
In a terrain already starved of upward mobility, equine conformation offers these schoolgirls some semblance of right and wrong—a semblance of protection, perhaps at the expense of direction. There’s hardly any mention or allusion of the girls riding horses themselves, they are relegated to expert observers, subservient critics at the periphery of agency, invisible supplements to the mythology of the American West’s cowboy, trained to protect and serve the conventions of young women in their withdrawn milieu, even if they feel trapped.
Halfway through the first act, the girls pressure Hilary to validate her spot in the team by judging each of them as if they were horses. They lift their arms, pout their waists, lean their heads, and urge the begrudging Hilary to inspect closely, taunting her, they think, into ridicule. In a play abundant in wit and gaiety, not only did this scene garner the steadiest laughs of the night, it was also one of the ensemble cast’s best examples of their talent in capturing the sentimental density of their characters and their age by positing girlhood and horse judging as comparable genres of cutthroat scrutiny. Daily the girls train their gaze to see their bodies divided into parts much like they see horses’: chests, hips, legs, faces, ranked by their ability in eventing, riding, and breeding.
Hilary replies to their game as if there’s no distinction between horses and the group, she laments one girl’s muscle flatness and another’s facial coarseness while praising another’s expressive circumference viewed from behind. The girls sulk and snivel while covering their bodies, shocked at such a reminder of their physical vulnerability.
The dangers and anxieties with which Bettis surrounds them are, after all, wholly centered on their bodies: chat room predators, local serial killers, volatile parents, and imprudent boyfriends—or merely infatuated schoolmates like Dan (Juan Sebastián Cruz), who innocently holds Hilary at gunpoint when asking her out—are the true center of their rural universes, not horses. They turn their own physical scrutiny outwards, repeatedly savoring the delights of “bitch” and “slut” as if the words were bullwhips to hide behind.
Members of the company in a scene from falcon girls by Hilary Bettis, directed by May Adrales. Yale Repertory Theatre, October 10–November 2, 2024. Photo © Joan Marcus.
As barometers for their sexualities, these words in Falcon Girls are either compliments or indictments, mostly the latter, as evinced by the gossip they gleefully toss around in the first act: Jasmine fucked a boy for $2.69. Rebecca is a jealous bitch. April wears slutty slut magenta nail polish. Mary: Christian lesbo. Carly: pregnant virgin. Hilary looks like a mutt horse. What the girlies mean to say is: to be an adolescent girl is to grow accustomed to being stripped of selfhood, and who better to do this than each other?
Even before motherhood or wifehood, the feminine roles that are foisted on these characters—model child, acquiescent girlfriend, or assault survivor—demand a willingness to be defined by something other than themselves. Sometimes horse evaluation trophies, other times religion or family. But mostly bodies. Bodies bodies bodies.
The second act’s opening is the closest we get to a day at the races. April calls Mary to apologize. April adds Jasmine on the other line. Mary stays on to call Rebecca. Jasmine calls Hilary. April tells Mary to tell Jasmine, Rebecca tells Mary to tell April to tell Jasmine who tells Mary to tell Rebecca, Hilary tells Rebecca to tell Mary who tells her to tell Jasmine who is told by Hilary to tell April who tells Hilary that she’s sorry. Round and round unleashing a hurricane of pleas onto that wooden cocoon of a stage (minimally and gothically designed by Beowulf Boritt). A tangled game of telephone in which your closest friends think you’re “suuuch a bitch.” But they still love you, as per April: “I’m really sorry. Everyone gets fingered!”
The rest of Act II continues softening the characters’ hard edges that Adrales went to such heavy-handed lengths to establish, climaxing at the group’s most ecstatic collective triumph when, cooped up in a hotel room on their way to nationals, they repel Jasmine’s online beau fearing that he’s their local serial killer. But celebration doesn’t last long as they ride Mr. K’s van back home, so overcome with the weight of their latest defeat that they’re almost slumping off the stage. “What’s your favorite thing in the whole world when you close your eyes?,” is the teacher’s last resort to breathe life into the group. The girls remain loyal to their horses, but Rebecca’s elsewhere, “I don’t know, Mr. K. I don’t know what makes me happy,” her mind is stuck on her mother’s disappointment. “What if I never know?”
Hilary opts to ride back alone with her mother, who arrived too late, and in mourning the team’s misfortune she reveals that her acrimonious view of her sole parent has been merely masking her distress over earning her respect. She ponders about her abortion, “Sometimes I wonder what she’d be like and it makes me sad. And now I’m just a bad ugly person forever.” She’s convinced her mom sees her the same.
The young women of Falcon Girls, like all women, must be hollow enough to accommodate alternative versions of their identities inside of themselves. Before they’re sure of who they are, they consume others’ stories—that they are too ugly, too sick, too earnest, too weak, too loud. Another twisted round of telephone in which the girls enforce their own status quo. But both Bettis and Adrales stand firmly on the side of youth. These characters aren’t hollow—precisely because they remain children. A child is not hollow. A child is abundant in truth and self-knowledge. Nestled in a child’s hands is an inveterate sovereignty. The girls remain naïve enough to adopt stories of themselves eagerly, but also wise enough to yearn for better lies.
In those final scenes of Falcon Girls, an abrupt realization restrained me. My eyes reminded me that I had met these girls before, but my mind failed to remember where. Maybe a college course? Was it an after party? Their fleet-footed expressions, a paucity of apathy. I recognized these people. All of them, I am lost in a sea of them; everyday I see a little of them all around, I see my own nostalgic instinct turn to the memory of those effusive, omnipresent girls of my past over and over and endlessly again. I took in once again the cast of white girls and white women of color up on that stage. I didn’t see myself, I never could have. I walked onto Chapel Street thinking that maybe I never have to. Yet another lie I keep telling myself.