Monday, February 28, 2011
‘Where Bison Run’ Victor Lesniewski’s Play About Hockey
NYTimes.com: "Unlike baseball and golf, say, the sport of hockey has not inspired a particularly illustrious body of literature. There are only a handful of decent hockey novels, chief among them “King Leary,” by the Canadian writer Paul Quarrington, and “Amazons,” by one Cleo Birdwell, supposedly the first woman to play in the National Hockey League. “Amazons” is actually by Don DeLillo, but for years now he has disowned the 1980 pseudonymous work, which may indicate something of hockey’s status among American literati, at least. By far the best book about hockey is still “The Game,” a memoir by the Hall of Fame goalie Ken Dryden that was published almost 30 years ago.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
This looks pretty good. I can think of a few plays that have sports references but not a lot of plays about sports. The article spends time recalling plays about hockey but I think for this to work as a hockey play it shouldn't really be about hockey but about a bigger picture examined through the lens of hockey culture. A good comparison might be Richard Greenburg's Take Me Out, a play about homophobia and masculinty set against the backdrop of a baseball locker room. It sounds like this hockey play will work on similiar analogous levels: post-Soviet collapse global politics & the globalization of American values set against the backdrop of an ice hockey team. I think this will work well and am excited to see if it takes off.
Ironic that we were just discussing this last week after the advent of the Bird Magic article. It'll be interesting how hockey will translate to a stage production, hopefully it will have more artistic integrity than Disney Princesses on Ice. However, I have seen other shows bring unique locations to the stage (i.e. golf course in Foursome, Antarctica in Terra Nova and a mountaintop in K2). However, I imagine they can tell the entire story without any on ice action whatsoever. Being a hockey fan and a theatre lover, I am interested in the development of this show. I'm not sure how many people actually fit this nitch besides me.
Post a Comment