“Glory” Dances into Hockey History at Theatre in the Round

Theatre in the Round

The first official hockey game in Minnesota was played in 1895, and we haven’t stopped since. However, it wasn’t until 1995 that schools started enough girls’ hockey programs to have a high school state tournament, and until 2004 that there was a professional (paid) women’s team (the Whitecaps, disbanded in 2023 before the start of the PWHL). That’s not just within living memory—it’s barely a generation ago.

Of course, this doesn’t mean women haven’t been playing hockey the whole time. Thirty players tried out for the inaugural Gopher Women’s hockey team in 1918. There were women’s teams all through the 1920s, until the Great Depression, and after World War II there were teams sponsored by local businesses. The first girls’ Pee Wee tournament was in 1974, more than 20 years before the high school state tournament.

In Canada, naturally, they were a few years ahead of us, but the story was similar. Women’s hockey began roughly at the same time that men’s did, and Isobel, daughter of Lord Stanley—namesake of the Stanley Cup—was famously one of the first to try it. The Ladies Ontario Hockey Association was formed in 1922, with 18 teams in its first season. By 1931, when the Preston Rivulettes formed a team, the league was declining due to the Great Depression, but that certainly didn’t stop women from wanting to play.

Enter Glory by Tracey Power. Based on the story of the Rivulettes, the play premiered in 2018 and is onstage now at Theatre in the Round in Minneapolis.

The Preston Rivulettes. Wikimedia Commons

Two pairs of sisters, Hilda and Nellie Ranscombe and Marm and Helen Schmuck, end their softball season disappointed. To have a sport to play during the winter, they form a hockey team, despite the fact that only one of them, Hilda, can actually play. She secures funding, and she bullies Herb Fach into being their coach.

Here’s where history sounds like fiction: After only a couple months of practice, they play a game to gain their entry into the postseason of the Ladies Ontario Hockey Association, and they win. Did that actually happen? Sort of—in reality, they played two games. From then on, they continue winning, but it’s 1933, and outside forces threaten to pull the team apart.

The play isn’t short on those outside forces, either. The Rivulettes are up against sexism, obviously. All their ice time is early in the morning or late at night until several years into their reign, when one player comments that it’s the first time they’ve gotten to practice during daylight. At one point, the players are forced into taking pictures for postcards, and it goes much more smoothly once one of them decides to give the photographers what they want, which is seductive poses in hockey gear. The team fights and slashes and cross-checks, and they’re constantly told that women don’t and can’t play like that.

One of the real-life postcards, featuring Nellie Ranscombe on the left and Ruth Dargel is on the right. Wikimedia Commons

In addition, the women are up against the Great Depression. Several teams fold during the course of the play. Hilda is perpetually out of work, because she hadn’t done particularly well in school and doesn’t want to do anything but play hockey, and the women who have jobs find their wages cut by half. Radio broadcasts remind the audience where the characters are in the buildup to World War II, and Marm and Helen Schmuck, who are Jewish, experience antisemitism at a number of points. Marm (Kelly Solberg) receives the brunt of the discrimination, and her monologue about it broke the heart of everyone in the theater at the performance I attended. The show does briefly touch on the discrimination against Black players, although it doesn’t linger.

Even with all of that weight leaning on it, the play has a lot of humor, from the physical mishaps of the early training montage to what seem to be digs at Toronto and its team, the Maple Leafs, from the Vancouver-area playwright. Helen Schmuck (Josie Ramler) has both some of the funniest lines (she’s a curling fan) and the most poignant. Nellie Ranscombe (Gabrielle Johnson) excels at physical humor; as the worst skater of the bunch, she is forced to play goalie, and the process of her learning how to play had the audience in stitches.

One might wonder how the performance handles the hockey games, especially in a relatively small, multisided theater (it is Theatre in the Round, after all). The answer is delightfully. The four players—one goalie, three skaters—dance through the games, in moves choreographed by Antonia Perez in a 1930s-inspired style to retro music, the steps leading seamlessly to shots on goal (with an imaginary puck). Nellie, the goalie, dances too, and lunges for saves. I’d recommend seeing Glory for this staging alone, but the set, the acting performances, and the story are all recommendation-worthy as well.

Brynn Kelly as Hilda Ranscombe cut the deepest for me. She plays a character familiar to many of us: a jock. Hilda wants to do nothing but play hockey, but even though she’s as good as any of the professional men and better than most of them—a historically accurate depiction—she has absolutely no chance of ever playing in the NHL, solely because she’s a woman. She can never get paid to do the thing she was most passionate about, not because it’s something that no one gets paid to do, but because it’s something that women don’t get paid to do. Late in the play, she says, “One day, there will be too many teams to play. The refs will be women, the coaches will be women.” It’s a cry of hope, and I wish we could say we’re there, but we certainly aren’t yet.

The Preston Rivulettes onstage. Courtesy of Theatre in the Round

In February 2023, I attended one of the last Whitecaps games (though we did not know that at the time), played against the Toronto Six at the Richfield Ice Arena. The two professional women’s teams could not warm up on the ice because two recreational men’s teams had paid for the ice time—for practice. Announcers for the PWHL still insist on identifying players by the men who are related to them; Alex Carpenter, who plays for the New York Sirens, can’t touch the puck without a mention of her father. The only article I could find about the 1979 women’s hockey Open B Divison national champions, the Minnesota Checkers, the first women’s team in Minnesota to win a national title, spends 90 percent of the article talking about the coach, the father of one of the players. In the play, the players are hoping to take the first steps toward having women’s hockey at the Olympics. That happened, but not until 1998.

There has been change, but it’s slow. The PWHL exists, all six teams of it, and it pays a minimum of $50,000 a year. Prorated for the lower number of games (30, compared to 82), that’s still less than 20 percent of the minimum in the NHL. $50,000 isn’t even a livable wage in most of the cities that have PWHL teams, and it certainly isn’t enough to afford all the luxuries like private chefs and extra training that the men take for granted. If we want to support women’s hockey, something that most interested people will at least claim to want, we need to pay women enough that they can be professionals. They need to be able to afford to be a hockey player and not have a second job and not be forced to marry for subsistence.

We also need to acknowledge the history of women’s hockey and the fact that it’s about 90 percent as long as men’s hockey. Stories like that of the Preston Rivulettes, as small as they are in the grand scheme of things, are the kind of story we need to acknowledge: one that shows that women have been here all along, and that women are just as passionate, just as hardworking, and even just as disgusting as the men who are paid to play.

Glory, directed by Sean Dooley, runs through February 9, 2025, at Theatre in the Round. On January 24, Minnesota Frost players Taylor Heise (2024 Walter Cup Playoff MVP) and Grace Zumwinkle (2024 PWHL Rookie of the Year) will be at the theater before the performance to meet fans. On February 2, there will be an audience discussion immediately following the show. Tickets are available through the Theatre in the Round website. The show is appropriate for ages 10 and older, with “mild swearing, moments of crude humor, and sports-related violence (it is hockey, after all).”