The cast of The Master Plan in a scene at Toronto's Crow’s Theatre.Supplied
Title: The Master Plan
Written by: Michael Healey
Director: Chris Abraham
Actors: Christopher Allen, Ben Carlson, Philippa Domville, Peter Fernandes, Yanna McIntosh, Tara Nicodemo and Mike Shara
Company: Crow’s Theatre
Venue: Streetcar Crowsnest
City: Toronto
Year: To Oct. 8, 2023
Critic’s Pick
“Don’t be evil.” Those words glare briefly from the screens above the stage in Michael Healey’s new play The Master Plan – only to be swiftly crossed out. You’ll recall that was once Google’s corporate slogan. The irony is worth remembering right now, as the tech giant faces a massive anti-trust lawsuit in the U.S. while, in Canada, it continues its punitive protest against the federal Online News Act rather than compensate Canadian media outlets.
The Google spinoff, Sidewalk Labs, as portrayed by Healey in this dense, frenetic but ultimately thought-provoking satire – the much-anticipated season opener at Crow’s Theatre – isn’t exactly evil. But devious, yes. And inept. Its ill-fated efforts at urban planning, the infamous Sidewalk Toronto debacle, failed partly thanks to the company’s toxic mix of American-style hubris and ignorance.
Mike Shara, centre, with Tara Nicodemo and Ben Carlson on the left, Philippa Domville (standing) and Christopher Allen sitting on left in The Master Plan.Supplied
Although to be fair – and Healey is – Sidewalk Labs was up against the mind-boggling intricacies of Canadian government bureaucracy, not to mention the notoriously cautious Canadian character.
Healey’s comedy is based on Globe and Mail reporter Josh O’Kane’s 2022 bestseller Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy. And while the show’s surtitles keep jokingly assuring us that what we’re watching is fiction, Healey sticks closely to the book in both fact and spirit, gleefully highlighting the inherent absurdities that O’Kane unearthed in his pursuit of what went wrong with the once-ballyhooed project.
Sidewalk Toronto, you’ll also recall, was meant to be a bold experiment in city-building: a smart, sustainable waterfront neighbourhood, to be created on a 12-acre parcel of land dubbed Quayside and funded by the Google sister company to the tune of $1.3-billion. It was enthusiastically endorsed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his provincial and civic counterparts when it launched in 2017. But growing public concerns over digital surveillance and behind-the-scenes tensions between Sidewalk Labs and the project’s overseer, the Waterfront Toronto agency, as well as other factors, led to its ignominious demise three years later.
It’s not a simple story to tell, even in a 2½-hour play, and Healey and director Chris Abraham often resort to explanatory narration and a barrage of graphics to help get it across. At times the show can feel as messy as the tale itself. But eventually, the humans at the heart of it, and the big dreams that fuelled them, begin to emerge.
The obvious villain would be Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff (a swaggering Mike Shara), the classic white alpha male who talks over everybody and gets his way by shouting and banging tables. Only he doesn’t always get his way. And despite his hotshot credentials and massive ego – a New York developer and former deputy mayor under the Bloomberg administration, he’s continually plugging his autobiography – we begin to at least understand his frustrations. He is, after all, beholden to his boss, Google co-founder Larry Page, whose sci-fi visions include floating cities and flying cars.
We can also feel for his fellow American, Waterfront Toronto CEO Will Fleissig (Ben Carlson), whose own irritation is palpable as he repeatedly tries to keep Doctoroff from going rogue. As Fleissig, Carlson does a superb job of looking perpetually pained.
The real heroes, though, are Waterfront execs Meg Davis (Philippa Domville) and Kristina Verner (Tara Nicodemo), who stalwartly defend the project’s goals even as they almost go crazy while Doctoroff continually tries to rewrite their terms of agreement. Domville’s Davis, indeed, at one point vents her fury in a slapstick outburst that begins with her snapping pencils and ends with a face-plant in a birthday cake.
Peter Fernandes as Tree, with Carlson in the background in The Master Plan.Supplied
There’s pathos, too, in the fictional figure of Cam (Christopher Allen), a sensitive young Sidewalk staffer who reveres urban guru Jane Jacobs. He passionately articulates the admirable intentions of the project and the importance of rethinking cities in the face of climate change.
These are the multiple facets we’d expect from Healey, whose nuanced political satires over the years have included 1979, about the brief prime ministership of Joe Clark, and Plan B, which grappled with Quebec separatism. Here he turns the Big Tech-versus-bureaucracy battle into a critique of both and, by extension, American-versus-Canadian attitudes. It’s the world of move-fast-and-break-things meets the world where the removal of an old tree on private property is a matter for City Hall.
A scene involving a city council hearing over said tree (a Norway maple, embodied by a green-clad Peter Fernandes) gets some of the biggest and most knowing laughs. Not surprisingly, this is a show best appreciated by a Toronto audience, who will also relish Yanna McIntosh’s parody of a French-challenged John Tory. The seven actors, all in various roles, also give us comical cameos of Trudeau, former Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne, local tech critic Bianca Wylie, even O’Kane himself in his role as a dogged reporter with a weakness for bad jokes.
This is familiar territory for Abraham, who commissioned the play as Crow’s artistic director and has made compelling forays into non-fiction theatre in the past (Seeds, The Watershed). He directs his impressive cast at high speed, with overlapping scenes, on an in-the-round set designed by Joshua Quinlan that suggests a boardroom. At times, its tables are stacked with models of the kind of carbon-neutral mass-timber buildings intended for Sidewalk Toronto. Video designer Amelia Scott provides the animation and live feeds that play across the screens above.
The Master Plan draws no definite lesson from the Sidewalk Labs fiasco, apart from its obvious warning about the perils of getting into bed with a tech giant. It does, however, leave us with a favourite line of Doctoroff’s: “It’s only a failure if you define it as a failure.” In Doctoroff’s mouth, it’s a self-serving remark, but perhaps this project was the necessary folly to point Toronto toward a more equitable revitalization of its waterfront.
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