The Toronto Theatre Review: Crow’s Theatre’s The Master Plan

By Ross

“Definitely, a lot to unpack here,” says one soul to another as Crow’s Theatre‘s magnificently tuned-in production of The Master Plan, gets underway, diving deep and hilariously into the corporate politics and City Hall antics with the sharpest of wit and wonder. Based around the Globe and Mail reporter Josh O’Kane’s nonfiction book ‘Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy‘, this captivatingly funny, smart play spins a strongly focused web around a slice of Torontonian history that I had completely missed out on – I guess it didn’t make its way down to NYC. But I sure wish it had.

Adapted most brilliantly into a fiercely funny play by Michael Healey (The Drawer Boy; Generous, Courageous, and Proud), the fantastically fictionalized non-fiction story dives headfirst into some captivating city developmental processing that both signifies all that is right, and most wrong in Canadian politics and public office dynamics. In a way, it sounded sorta educational and possibly stiff, going in, but as unwound here by this most excellent team of theatre makers, it certainly made me lean in and listen, in a way that one of the characters, even though he claims to be “a listener” never actually seems to. Yet, as the structuring and the history begin to unravel before our very eyes, the sordid tall wooden tale certainly is one that pulls you in most happily.

I must admit I didn’t know much about it all; that time when Google, by way of its Sidewalk Labs division, tried with all its mighty might to buy and develop a parcel of land sandwiched way down between the lake and the Gardiner Expressway. It was a slice of Toronto waterfront land that was seen, at least by the Waterfront Toronto organization, as an exciting place to develop and experiment with an idea for a better place to live; a carbon-negative neighbourhood and a “city of the future,” based on a progressive idealized tech-dream filled with affordable housing and state-of-the-art efficiency. But the partnership was a complex one, made clear from the get-go by the way a slick Dan Doctoroff, CEO of Sidewalk Labs, played strong and stompy by Mike Shara (Canadian Stage’s Take Me Out), moves around the space with a dismissive, and untrustworthy loud air. Standing in as the symbolic figurehead of one of the largest conglomerates in the world, Google (which is wonderfully unpacked for us in an avalanche of facts and names by a tree – more on that later) was never going to engage cooperatively with the Canadian system of doing things, as “adorable” and confusingly difficult as it is. Dan, and the company, were always going to try to bulldoze their way through the system, just like Dan proudly explains he did in NYC. So why wouldn’t it work here as well, Dan believes.

The doomed-from-day-one fiasco all began optimistically in 2017 when that small parcel of long-forsaken land on the city’s underdeveloped lakeshore was made available for development and Google co-founder Larry Page and his chairman Eric Schmidt saw an opening. The two began to lean in and pitch a progressive idea through the framework of Sidewalk Labs for the property, and with the pushy and determined Doctoroff as the urban-planning company’s CEO, profit and power were seen written in the future. Sidewalk’s bid dutifully crushed the competition, as seen in the dynamically presented and played-out Master Plan contest. But as soon as that initial bid was won, the team building between Doctoroff and the determined Waterfront Toronto’s team started to evaporate in a cultural power play that left a P.R. gap that was soon filled in with public fear and outspoken suspicion. 

The partnership, as you can well imagine, didn’t go as planned. And as the systematic story of corporate greed slammed itself full force into this country’s governmental structuring, The Master Plan finds its fantastic formula in the outrageous details and dynamics that brought this short-lived partnership to its untimely and ultimate deathbed. Thank god, I imagine, as the play, brilliantly directed by Chris Abraham (Crow’s Uncle Vanya, Stratford’s Much Ado About Nothing), continues most fantastically forward, the unraveling is filled to the brim with humourous takes on so many aspects and absurdities of Toronto and this country, with sharply focused lines being dutifully delivered by the play’s most excellent cast. There isn’t a bad egg in the group, donning numerous hats of extraordinary personas to document and deliver O’Kane’s detailed account of this disaster. And what a ride it is.

Narrated, to great effect, by a surprisingly talkative tree, portrayed with a clever disposition by Peter Fernandes (Crow’s Fifteen Dogs), the painfully funny and well-crafted battle to reel in the hungry power-seeking of Sidewalk Labs has deep roots in its structuring, setting up the city’s ultimate failure of futuristic urban development carefully and with humorous determination. Formated cleverly by set and props designer Joshua Quinlan (Stratford’s Casey and Diana), with a spectacular assist by costume designer Ming Wong (Bad Hats’ Alice in Wonderland), lighting designer Kimberly Purtell (Crow’s The Chinese Lady), sound designer Thomas Ryde Payne (Crow’s Red Velvet), and video designer Amelia Scott (Porte Parole’s The Assembly), the play’s commission, rooted in real-life political unravelings, finds and delivers the ridiculous and the arrogance with the clearest of clever strokes. The broadcast streamings of executives and bureaucrats, filmed and refocused on screens around the doomed Quayside project, roll out as tearfully brilliant as what the young Sidewalk designer Cam Malagaam, touchingly portrayed by the excellent Christopher Allen (Tarragon’s Redbone Coonhound), has to say in his dynamically delivered utopian speech that ultimately gives the project, and the whole piece, its strongly felt emotional heart and soul.  

And when the resigning texts start coming in, alarmingly one after the other, detailing the conflictual unraveling of the project, it is the team at Waterfront Toronto; Philippa Domville (Tarragon’s If We Were Birds) as Meg Davis, Tara Nicodemo (Planet 88’s Cringeworthy) as Kristina Verner, Ben Carlson (Stratford’s Richard III) as Will Fleissig, and Yanna McIntosh (Obsidian’s Ruined) as Helen Burstyn, Waterfront Toronto’s board chair, that elevate the frenetic moment that is at the core. Domville and Nicodemo are particularly blazingly good, holding their own most powerfully against that “drunk baby with a pistol“; i.e. the corporate clowns of Sidewalk Labs.  They fight and smash their literal faces into cake in the hope of staying true to their, possibly too grandiose idea of formulating and building something unheard of, brilliant, clever, and new, much like, pretty much, everything about this production of The Master Plan, which is high praise, indeed. 

With director Abraham’s smashingly good cast unleashing their excellence all over those finely crafted and hilarious lines, the show revels in its comedy underpinning, rolling out sharply defined quips, like John Tory’s bad French, that, to be honest, flew over my head in their referential tone. Sometimes the formulation is a bit too busy, loading and unloading wooden models over and over again, for seemingly no solid referential purpose, but the quips and the jabs made me laugh even if I wasn’t tuned in to the factual landscape they were built upon. The play engulfs, creates, enlivens, and excites, mainly because of the clever delivery of the equally clever play. But at its core, it’s the tightness of its structural formulations that sold me on The Master Plan at Crow’s Theatre, Toronto. 

The Master Plan runs at Crow’s Theatre until October 8. For information and tickets, click here.