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0-9739093-5-8
60 pp  6 x 9 in
$12.95 (Cdn) pb
April 2006

Cast Size: 35-60
Running Time: 75 Min
$30/Performance

Excerpt

“If all the year were playing at hockey,
To sport, would be as tedious as to work.”

About the Play
Hockey is in crisis. Commissioner Wolsey and Players’ Association Director Buckingham are at loggerheads over a new Collective Bargaining Agreement and it looks like a first ever locked-out season for the EHA (Elizabethan Hockey Association). With empty airplay to fill, a sports network journeys back in time through a series of flashbacks to replay historic matches from hockey’s Golden Years in an era before million-pound contracts – in other words, before they wore helmets – back to the Original Six, with Richard’s Rangers, Bolingbroke’s Bruins, Hotspur’s Black Hawks, Glendower’s Red Wings and Monmouth’s Maple Leafs battling for the right to take on the formidable French Habs!

Upstart Crow Sports Network (UCSN) proudly brings you Shakespeare’s NHL (National History League), a clever hybrid of improvised sporting play and spectacle theatre transforming Shakespeare’s remaining History plays into Old-Time Hockey. John Fletcher and Jack Falstaff provide all the play-by-play colour commentary with interviews and updates from that rinkside historian/reporter Raphael Holinshed, as hockey’s Historical Heroes faceoff for Lord Stanley’s impressive Cup!

About the Authors
Chris Coculuzzi works as an educator for the Toronto District School Board and is a co-founder and member of an independent democratic school. He also works in theatre as a producer, director, actor, and playwright. He is the co-author and editor of the Shakespeare's Sports Canon series of five plays: Shakespeare's Rugby Wars, Shakespeare's World Cup, Shakespeare's Gladiator Games, Shakespeare's Comic Olympics, and Shakespeare's NHL (National History League). Other adaptations include Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and an abridged version of Cyrano de Bergerac (co-authored with Roxanne Deans). He currently resides in Toronto with his companion Kathy and their children Cabiria, Lórien, and Paisley.

Matt Toner is a regular lecturer on progressive media theory and works in video game development in Vancouver as a Lead Designer. As a playwright Matt has developed scripts through the Master Playwrights’ Workshop of New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre, the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center and Uta Hagen’s HB Studio. Matt is the co-author of four of the Shakespeare's Sports Canon series: Shakespeare's Rugby Wars, Shakespeare's World Cup, Shakespeare's Gladiator Games, and Shakespeare's NHL (National History League). Other titles include Objects in Mirror May be Closer than They Appear, Jessie Bell from Arkansas, Killing Time at the Crossroads of the World, The Pimp Hand of God, and We Unhappy Few.

Quotes
“Enthusiastic [with] knee-slapping one-liners.” – Eye Weekly