About the Play:
High Sticking is a collective title for three comic short plays about hockey by Mark Brownell. Subtitled Three Period Plays, this hat trick of short hockey plays explore the Canadian passion
for hockey, as well as some other national obsessions! Also included is another short puck drama, Table Top, which features the first-ever table-top hockey brawl.
Coach Kingston Tells It Like It Is satirizes hockey parents
and peewee-league fanaticism. The rabidly competitive hockey coach of
a peewee hockey team besides exhorting his 8-year-old charges on to
greater glory, delivers a pep talk to a mild-mannered hockey dad on
the importance of anger, hatred, loathing, giving 115 percent, and
the immortal soul, and cautions parents against a myriad of ills,
including mixing hockey and figure skating. (Cast: 2 male)
Eleanor boldly uncovers the brutal world of girls' field
hockey. A one-woman play about a teenage field hockey goon who vents
her pent-up hostility with a "hack and slash" approach to
the game. She ruminates on the finer points of the game, and Karl
Marx, Louis Vuitton bags and much more, while waiting out a series of
penalties on the sidelines. (Cast: 1 female)
Life Without Gretzky, a sort of play-within-a-play, is the tale of a performance artist, who, in addition to being a part-time window cleaner and full-time Edmonton Oilers fan, is coming to grips with the selling
of Wayne Gretzky. He is preparing a piece for the Edmonton Fringe on the infamous deal that sent "The Great One" from
Edmonton to Los Angeles. (Cast: 1 male)
Coach Kingston Tells it Like it Is, Eleanor, and
Life Without Gretzky were first performed together as a
triptych called High Sticking in
1989 at the Palmerson Library Theatre during
The Toronto Fringe Festival and subsequent Fringe Tour and
then in 1990 at the Lunchbox Theatre in Calgary, Alberta.
What people say:
"Together, the three plays
are entertaining 75 minutes of theatre, smartly written by Mark
Brownell, minimally staged by director Alan Williams and uniformly
well-acted." — Toronto Star
"The playwright’s particular
talent is humorously weaving several other important obsessions into
the hockey fabric: sexuality, violence, art and especially organized
religion are all lampooned, sometimes simultaneously." —
NOW Magazine
"High Sticking is
a thoroughly entertaining look at life through the eyes of
hockey-loving Canucks." — Edmonton Sun
Table Top is about an
Anglophone Leafs fan, a Francophone Habs fan, and an Amercian Rangers
fan who
end up in the first-ever table-top hockey brawl as they in
compete for the Holy Grail of
table-top hockey: The Hubbard Cup. (Cast: 3 male)
Tabletop was first
performed in 1998 at Tarragon Spring Arts Fair, and later that year
at The Alleyway Theatre in Buffalo and Alberta Theatre Projects in
Calgary.
What people say:
"Imagine three guys in hockey
pullovers, the American in a Sabres jersey, guy from Toronto in a
Leafs jersey, the French-Canadian in a Montreal jersey. It is a
sharply performed and directed lethally comic piece about guys and
hockey and the differences between Canadians and Americans and
Canadians and Canadians, ending in a tabletop hockey game – with
the winner gaining bragging rights over all." — Buffalo
News
About the Playwright:
Mark Brownell is a Canadian playwright and co-artistic
director of the Pea Green Theatre Group. He is a graduate of the
National Theatre School of Canada (Canada's Julliard), and has been a
playwright-in-residence at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre. He currently teaches at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, George Brown College Acting Program and The Toronto Film School.
