The New Canadian Curling Club

By Mark Crawford

A Chinese medical student, a Jamaican Tim Horton's manager, an Indian father of three, and a 17-year-old Syrian refugee walk into a curling club. It's Monday night at a small-town rink and it's the first-ever Learn to Curl class for new Canadians. Inspired by the local refugee resettlement program, community-minded Marlene organized this evening to welcome newcomers and "diversify the club". But when she slips on the ice and breaks her hip, the club's ice-maker—who also happens to be Marlene’s ex-husband—Stuart MacPhail is forced to step in as head coach. Trouble is, Stuart has plenty of opinions about immigrants. What follows is the hilarious and inspiring story of a group of unlikely athletes who face off against local prejudice and become a true team. Both laugh-out-loud funny and quietly moving, The New Canadian Curling Club is a new Canadian comedy with a heart as big as Canada itself!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scirocco Drama
• Release date: Jul 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781990737824

Mark Crawford

In his first career as an exploration geologist, Mark Crawford spent 18 years prowling forests and deserts in search of gold and silver. Much of this time was spent in the Southeast, where he researched this book, discovering new materials and sources that can only be found by driving up dirt roads and knocking on ancestral doors. Now writing full-time, Crawford is the author of four other books, including the Encyclopedia of the Mexican-American War.

Book preview

Cover: The New Canadian Curling Club by Mark Crawford, published under Scirocco Drama, by J. Gordon Shillingford, shows a woman kneeling as she throws a curling stone or rock on the curling sheet in one hand, and in the other, she is holding a curling broom. The woman is wearing a hijab, a top, and trousers, paired with sneakers, and gloves.

The New Canadian

Curling Club

Mark Crawford

The New Canadian Curling Club

first published 2019 by Scirocco Drama

An imprint of J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing Inc.

© 2019 Mark Crawford

Scirocco Drama Editor: Glenda MacFarlane

Cover design by Doowah Design

Author photo by Liz Beddall

Cover photo by Erin Wallace Photography

Blyth Festival Production Photos by Terry Manzo

Alberta Theatre Projects Production Photos by Benjamin Laird

Printed and bound in Canada on 100% post-consumer recycled paper.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Manitoba Arts Council and

The Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason, by any means, without the permission of the publisher. This play is fully protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union and is subject to royalty. Changes to the text are expressly forbidden without written consent of the author. Rights to produce, film, record in whole or in part, in any medium or in any language, by any group, amateur or professional, are retained by the author.

Licensing Inquiries, please contact:

Colin Rivers, Marquis Entertainment

312-73 Richmond Street West

Toronto, ON M5H 4E8

[e-mail]

416.960.9123

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: The new Canadian curling club / Mark Crawford

Names: Crawford, Mark, 1981- author.

Description: A play.

Identifiers: Canadiana 20190136618 | ISBN 9781927922538 (softcover)

Classification: LCC PS8605.R435 N49 2019 | DDC C812/.6—dc23

J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing

P.O. Box 86, RPO Corydon Avenue, Winnipeg, MB Canada R3M 3S3

For my parents, Gord and Sally.

Photograph of the author Mark Crawford. He is in a formal attire: a dark-coloured blazer over a white shirt with dark-coloured prints.

Mark Crawford

Since his first play premiered in 2014, Mark Crawford has quickly become one of Canada’s most popular playwrights. In addition to The New Canadian Curling Club, Mark’s plays are: Stag and Doe, Bed and Breakfast, The Birds and the Bees, and Boys, Girls, and Other Mythological Creatures, all of which have been published by Scirocco Drama. Mark’s plays have been widely produced by theatre companies across Canada and in 2019, Stag and Doe made its international premiere in Poland. As an actor, Mark has performed on stages across the country. He grew up on his family’s farm near Glencoe, Ontario, studied theatre at the University of Toronto and Sheridan College, and now lives in Stratford.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Gil Garratt and the Blyth Festival for commissioning The New Canadian Curling Club. I’m deeply grateful for their support from the very beginning.

Miles Potter was instrumental in the development of this play. An enormous thank you to Miles for his dramaturgical guidance, rigour, sense of humour, and for making it slide across the stage for the first time.

Thank you to the original cast for their input, insight, integrity, and incredible talent. And thanks to every member of the Blyth Festival staff and production team for their tireless work on the premiere production.

I’m also very grateful to Darcy Evans and the artists and cultural consultants who worked on the play’s second production at Alberta Theatre Projects.

For assistance with research, translation, and the development of this script, I would like to thank: Sharif Almassad and Abeer Allias; Kelsey Benneweis; Majdi Bou-Matar; Adrian Choong; Rex Crawford and the Orangeville Curling Club; Rob Douglas and the Stratford Curling Club; Janelle Hanna; Shaleen Hudda Mulvaney; Nada Humsi; Wendy Hutton, Jack and Mary Helen McLauchlan and Egmondville United Church; Rachael King; Krystal Kiran; Derek Kwan; John McFadzean and the Seaforth Curling Club; Mark McGrinder; Karen Robinson; Anusree Roy; Kris Siddiqi; Stratford Festival; Kimberly Tuck and our friends at Canada Curling Stone Company.

Huge thank yous to: my agent Colin Rivers and the team at Marquis Literary; the good folks at Playwrights’ Guild of Canada; James Reaney and Parmida Vand for their contributions to this publication; and Karen Haughian and Glenda MacFarlane at Scirocco Drama for their continued support of my work.

Last but not least, I am so grateful for my family, my friends, and my partner Paul. Thanks, folks. I love you.

Foreword

by James Stewart Reaney

The coolest place to be in True North drama is still The New Canadian Curling Club.

Mark Crawford’s new Canadian comedy received its world premiere in a splendid production at The Blyth Festival in the summer of 2018. Now that Crawford’s miracle on ice is being published, two important things that were apparent last summer are just as true in its print incarnation.

Spoiler alert: You will laugh. Out loud. And often.

Further spoiler alert: You will reflect on what it is to be Canadian.

Sometimes, the laughter feels wrong, iswrong. But still funny.

You figure this is what it’s like at the United Nations? Standing around with your dick in your hand waiting for Jamaica, India, and Syria to turn up? jokes embittered keeper of the curling flame Stuart MacPhail. Stuart’s unsteady decline from a small Canadian town’s ace curler to its arena maintenance worker is rocked when he finds himself coaching a diverse quartet of the town’s new Canadians.

Tim Hortons employees Charmaine Bailey (Jamaica in Stuart’s curling UN), Anoopjeet Singh (his India), and teenage Syrian refugee Fatima Al-Sayed are three-fourths of the novice rink. The skip is Michael Chang, a medical student from China, who is romantically involved with Stuart’s granddaughter, Katie.

That cast of five provides plenty of fire on ice in Crawford’s rinkiverse. Over two months, on either side of Christmas, the four new Canadians and the old-stock Stuart feud and flurry over the icy surfaces that are a miniature Great White North. As Anoopjeet – Stuart’s match in barbs – says to his rinkmates: I think we need to ask ourselves: do we really want to spend an hour a week learning to curl from Mr. Seven Generations of Scottish Supremacy? Amazingly, the answer turns out to be Yes.

With increasing skill, the new Canadians find their curling squats and smarts. With its entertaining detours into curling strategy, Crawford’s script brings surprising character development.

Fatima responds to Stuart’s description of curling as chess on ice. A chess ace, she begins to find her way into the subtleties of the roaring game. That revelation of the game’s intricacies makes Crawford’s script stand out in the too-small list of Canadian works with curling themes. Somewhere in that pantheon are W.O. Mitchell’s 1951 radio play The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon – which continues to thrive in a stage adaptation – and Paul Gross’s 2002 film Men with Brooms. But neither of those works has a shot like this, delivered by Anoopjeet: "Maybe