The Hockey Plays: A Hat Trick of Shorts About Hockey & Life by Con Chapman

ISBN #1-933159-07-3
JAC #2005-0008

Number One Hockey Mom
Number One Hockey Mom, a ten-minute play about two hockey moms.

• JOANIE
• DEBBIE

Please, Pope
Please, Pope is a monologue about a Boston youth hockey coach who travels to the Vatican to talk the Pope out of banning Sunday games.

• KENNY (or KAREN) HAVERN

What Mickey Belle Isle Told You
What Mickey Belle Isle Told You is a one-act play about the fading dreams of a hockey dad for his son.

• JACKIE
• KYLE
• SPIDER
• MICKEY BELLE ISLE

A Note from the Author

The Hockey Plays are three case studies in what a pathologist of sports might call dementia hockeypuckistica—the impaired social functioning, personality change and psychosis that result from prolonged exposure to youth hockey.  As a hockey dad for seven years, I observed the symptoms of this disease first-hand at rinks throughout eastern Massachusetts. Worse, as a man who has skated on ice only twice in his life, I have experienced some of them myself, much as a walker in the woods will find himself suffering from Lyme Disease after a single bite by a tiny deer tick.  The disease manifests itself in certain characteristic ways; a delusion that your son or daughter has the skills to win a college scholarship or play with the pros; a conviction that all referees are biased against your child’s team, possibly as the result of criminal bribery; and a compulsion to drive your children to every practice and game on the schedule in the hope that each time the skates are laced, your mites/bantams/midgets get that much closer to fulfilling your—I mean their—dreams.  Please, Pope is a monologue in which a Boston youth hockey parent travels to Rome to try and talk the Pope out of banning hockey on Sunday. Number One Hockey Mom features two mothers whose enthusiasm for their sons’ team is exceeded only by the resentment they feel towards the wealthy suburban mothers whose children play for the opposing team. What Mickey Belle Isle Told You is a diorama that depicts the place where hockey dads’ dreams go to die.  Americans who know little or nothing of hockey are familiar with the moment when some wag in the stands at the ball park let’s loose with "Play ball!" at the conclusion of the national anthem. The correlative exclamation for hockey is in order as a coda to this note—Drop the puck! -Con Chapman

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Perhaps you'd like to consider something from Chapman's other shorts collections A Guy Walks Into a Bar and West of Boston?

What Mickey Belle Isle Told You was performed as part of the Salem (MA) Theatre Company’s 2004 New Play Series.

Author Biography

Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever, a history of the 1978 Red Sox season, and A View of the Charles, a novel. He has written twenty plays, including the following which have been performed, published or recognized:

• The Little Theatre is a one-act play for middle and high school audiences that follows a group of four students as they prepare for a speech and debate tournament. It is published by Eldridge Publishing;

• The Undertakers Club is a one-act play for middle and high school audiences about a group of adolescent outcasts who start their own student organization devoted to mortuary science. It was a finalist in the 2003 Jackie White Memorial National Children’s Play Writing Contest and is published by Brooklyn Publishers;

• The 5:05 is a one-act depiction of an evening’s run on a Boston commuter train. It received a staged reading as part of the Boston Directors Lab 2003 New Directions Playwright Festival and was a semi-finalist at the 2002 Nantucket Short Play Competition;

• The Picket Line, a full-length play about a labor dispute in a small Massachusetts town, received a staged reading by the Manhattan Theatre Cooperative in January of 2005;

• The Last Day of the Mai-Tai Novelty Company is a ten-minute play about a foreclosure sale at which an old lady with her eye on a box of stuffed animals gets into a bidding war with a professional bottom-fisher. It was performed as part of Acme Theatre’s 2003 New Works Winter Festival in Maynard, Massachusetts.The Ten-Minute Workshop is a ten-minute play about ten-minute plays. It was performed at the Hovey Players 2003 Summer Shorts Festival and was the favorite comedy of “The Theater Mirror: New England’s Live Theatre Guide.” It was also performed as part of the 2004 “Buffalo Quickies Festival” at the Alleyway Theatre in Buffalo, New York.

• Take Out the Trash is a ten-minute play about whom, as between a man and woman who share an apartment, will take out the trash. It was performed as part of the Theatre Collaborative’s 2004 Ritalin Readings and the Arlington Friends of the Drama “Short Takes Festival” in Arlington, Massachusetts.

• Fast Nickels, a one-act play about a used car salesman, was performed as part of the New England Academy of Theatre’s 2004 Short & NEAT One Act Play Festival in New Haven, Connecticut.

• Let Me Buy You a Drink, a ten-minute play that depicts a couple getting rid of a boor who bothers them in a bar, was read as part of the Eatful Day Plays of the Emerging Artists Theatre Company in New York in September of 2004.

• The Hat Trick, a two-act play, received a staged reading by The New Play House in Frederick, Maryland, in December of 2004.

• The Writer and the Talker, a ten-minute play about a man’s failed attempt to pick up an introverted woman in a bar, was performed as part of the Theatre Collaborative’s 2005 Ritalin Readings.