The Master Plan is crackling and compelling theatre about Toronto scandal
The award-winning Canadian hit about a waterfront boondoggle comes to Hamilton in a landmark production at Theatre Aquarius, running Oct. 30 to Nov. 16.
It’s fair to say The Master Plan made an impression on Theatre Aquarius artistic director Mary Francis Moore.
“My jaw was on the floor.”
Reflecting on the experience of seeing the play in Toronto last year, Moore says she felt like she’d “just been part of one of the most important conversations to happen in decades.” It’s a conversation she hopes resonates with Hamiltonians when the play opens at the end of the month, in a co-production with Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre on the Theatre Aquarius Mainstage.
Striking like a thunderbolt, penned by award-winning playwright Micheal Healey and directed by visionary Chris Abraham, The Master Plan takes the $1.3 billion boondoggle of Google’s Sidewalk project on Toronto’s waterfront and transforms it into a uproarious satire on how competing egos, corporate malfeasance and bureaucratic bungling ripped apart a utopian vision for the waterfront.
The Sidewalk Toronto project began in 2017 as a collaboration between Waterfront Toronto and Google’s Sidewalk Labs to develop the harbourfront as a sustainable community integrating high-tech infrastructure alongside “people-centred neighbourhoods.” As chronicled by the Globe and Mail’s Josh O’Kane in the best-selling book Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, the project was a failure, a demonstration of how the loftiest of visions can come crashing to earth.
It’s the kind of story every Hamiltonian should see. Setting aside this city’s headaches around stadiums, casinos and LRT, The Master Plan is crackling theatre that challenges audiences to deeply think about timely issues while gifting them with some of the funniest moments on stage. It’s something that surprised O’Kane when he was asked if the book was a comedy or a tragedy.
“I was stumped for a moment. But I had to admit that some of those facts were funny – and that Healey had found the comedy in them.” O’Kane adds that “(Healey) did a remarkable amount of research, interviewing enough key players from the Sidewalk project that he managed to talk with at least one person who wouldn’t pick up my calls. He clearly cared for getting the story right.”
A multiple award-winning playwright, Healey is synonymous with razor-sharp wit mixed with a keen eye for political satire. In works such as Proud and 1979, he expertly skewered the political class of Ottawa. But in The Master Plan, the impetus to turn his eye towards big tech and bureaucracy came from Abraham. “Chris asked me if I would read the book,” recalls Healey, “and I said yes as a courtesy.”
But as the playwright spent time with the story, “I came to have a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the proposal and the personalities involved.” As a playwright, Healey says that O’Kane’s narrative helped flesh out the drama. “There’s lots of great narrative in it, big characters – he even provided a couple of scenes that I could just lift out and make my own.”
These big characters, based on actual persons key to the Sidewalk debacle, are portrayed by top-tier Canadian performers from Stratford and Toronto stages like Ben Carlson, Tanja Jacobs and Rose Napoli. Others, like Mike Shara and Phillipa Domville, have worked with Theatre Aquarius in the past. Though most of the cast from Crow’s is returning for the Aquarius production, there are notable newcomers, including Healey’s own highly anticipated return to the stage in the role of Tree, the play’s ersatz narrator and audience surrogate.
It’s just one of the factors that excites Moore when it comes to Aquarius’ partnership with Crow’s. "Getting Michael Healey performing in his own work? That doesn't happen every day, so it’s a thrill.” It’s much like the deep synergy that has now come to define the close relationship between Crow’s Theatre and Moore’s direction of Aquarius, one that started with her theatre’s successful remount of Uncle Vanya earlier this year.
“Vanya was a great experience for us,” says Moore. “We sort of rebuilt elements of the show from the Toronto production to work on our stage. And what developed was a really great relationship between the two theatres, between our production department and theirs. Our two teams worked well together; it was seamless and mutually respectful.”
Following the success of Uncle Vanya, which would then go on to an acclaimed run at Mirvish, Abraham again reached out to Moore with a proposal to co-produce The Master Plan on the Aquarius Mainstage. Having just seen the play, “it was something so extraordinary that when I had the opportunity to bring it here, I jumped at it.”
The Master Plan earned widespread accolades from critics and audiences alike where it earned sold-out houses and won the Dora Award for Best New Play and Best Scenic & Projection Design. But can a piece so uniquely focused on the urban issues of Toronto work for Hamilton? “Unequivocally,” says Moore. “I thought it had a necessary place in the conversation about Hamilton. There's a lot of the same elements here, if not more so.
“The play was part of such a moment in Toronto last year, there was this zeitgeist,” says Moore. It’s important, she thinks, for Aquarius to catch some of that energy here, even as our city is wrestling with its own conversations around urban development.
“We're not talking about Sidewalk Labs, but we're talking about stadiums that went into different parts of neighbourhoods. We're talking about vacant lots that were supposed to be film studios and art centres and then didn't.”
Indeed, Moore believes The Master Plan is a broadly appealing show. “You could take this play and put it anywhere in the world. And the themes and those personalities, and those egos are so universal. We're not sharing the exact issues. But we have our own. So I think there's something about this play that holds up a mirror to us as a Hamilton audience. So, if this play provokes more conversation, I'm really excited about that.”
Bringing The Master Plan and its in-the-round staging from Crow’s to the large proscenium of Aquarius is no mean feat. But Moore says her theatre is taking an unconventional approach to staging, one that will take local audiences by surprise. “We will have audiences on stage. They're not part of the play. The action is the play. The audience will be in the dark. But they will be on stage.”
Given Abraham’s vision for the play, including multimedia, projections and breaking of the fourth wall, the staging approach is one that Moore believes audiences should take a risk on. “Chris understands audiences and he understands storytelling; what I love about his work is it shows an innate awareness of the relationship between the action and the audience.”
Integral to the success of the show, of course, is the collaboration between the production teams at Aquarius and Crow’s to bring such a complex show like The Master Plan to Aquarius. But lead designers Julie Fox and Joshua Quinlan have not only taken their in-the-round design and reimagined it for Aquarius, they’ve been instrumental in overseeing its construction in Aquarius’ shop alongside production director Michael Walsh and his team.
For Moore, this kind of creative collaboration is more than transactional. “It’s not anonymous,” she says, “it’s relationship building.” And that, she maintains, is the key to making The Master Plan as memorable for Hamilton audiences as it was for her a year ago.
“I'm very excited to see what translates to our stage.”
The Master Plan runs at Theatre Aquarius from Oct. 30 to Nov. 16. Tickets are available here.
