Kenneth Brown in Life After Life After Hockey, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective

Life After Life After Hockey (Stage 13, La Cité francophone)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“O for a muse of fire!” as Rink Rat Brown did not say under a prairie winter night sky in Life After Hockey.

No, as Rink Rat’s creator Kenneth Brown discovered at the Edmonton Fringe in his hit play of 1985 — and confirmed in the course of playing him more than 1,200 times in the next 17 years — it was a muse of ice. And Rink Rat didn’t have to ask for it, or invoke it. In this country, there is nothing more inspirational, more euphoric, more culturally intrinsic than the bond between ice and man. Especially if man is outside, holding a stick and shooting a puck.

In his new creation Life After Life After Life, directed by Sean Quigley, playwright/actor Brown arrives back onstage in his hockey jersey once more to reflect on life and theatre, and the Fringe, and the weirdly unplanned links between the three.  He has an appealingly self-deprecating charm onstage, as he conjures a boyhood self who spent hours playing shinny at the community league rink with his pals. “Garneau kids didn’t live through winter; we lived in winter.”

To a soundtrack invented spontaneously and played live by singer-songwriter Dana Wylie,  Brown, like his famous protagonist, apostrophizes, in poetry, the NLF idols who occupied his dreams. And when the hockey gods were in the front row enjoying Life After Hockey, and Gordie Howe was telling him “that was perfect!” Brown conjures for us the wonder of it all, and the theatre career that erupted from it.

A hit hockey play: that hadn’t been his goal when he arrived back in Edmonton from theatre school.  “I was going to make a theatre of protest,” he says with a hint of amused affection for his younger self. “A theatre based on the spoken word.” Enter THEATrePUBLIC.

It’s nostalgia of a particular kind that fuels Life After Life After Hockey. It’s nostalgia with regret on the flip side, since success and the grind of touring exact a heavy price on relationships and happiness. Brown is knowing and rueful, and that colours the show.

Kenneth Brown in Life After Life After Hockey, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective

Like so many of his experiments at the Fringe, this new piece has its own original shape. It’s more an illustrated memoir than a play, and more a variety performance piece than a memoir. There are original songs with Wylie, an ode to Edmonton by poet Pierrette Requier, and appearances by younger actors, like Candice Fiorentino (Anatolia Speaks), with whom he’s worked.

And above all, it’s a love letter to the enabling, transforming presence of the mighty Fringe Festival, that changed a city and its artists.

There’s an arc. Names of hockey stars, the Great One, Glen Sather, and the rest, are dropped in the first part of Life After Life After Hockey. Gradually, the name-dropping changes. As an acting teacher and mentor to young talent, he tells us of his new generation of theatre collaborators: Jon Paterson of RibbitRePublic, Caley Suliak, Bob Rasko….  They’re names the Fringe has taught us to know. What has spooled backwards in time, now spools forward.

As Brown promises at the outset, he will reveal the secret of happiness. As Rink Rat probably said in the play that defined him, “puckin’ A.”

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