When he wrote hit “The Master Plan” for Crow’s Theatre, playwright Michael Healey didn’t have one

Toronto playwright Michael Healey has a massive hit on his hands. The Master Plan, the Crow’s Theatre 2023 season opener, has garnered heaps of critical praise and has been playing to packed houses. The inaugural run has been extended one final time until October 19, but the hit show feels almost certain to make an extended reappearance in Toronto next year. 

Best known for the very different The Drawer Boy (2012), Healey wrote The Master Plan based on reporter Josh O’Kane’s much-praised non-fiction work Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy. The book is the detailed, blow-by-blow inside story of what happened when Google’s Sidewalk Labs gained the opportunity to develop a de novo smart neighbourhood on a vacant parcel of Toronto’s port lands. The Quayside development was to be a global showcase for innovation in technology, sustainability and user-centred design. It promised to be a crown jewel of Toronto’s underutilized lakeside port lands. The Master Plan satirizes the combination of bureaucracy, ego, corporate overreach and fear that led Google – under intense criticism from privacy advocates  — to walk away in 2020. The parcel of land (which the production shows in a live camera feed at play’s end) is still undeveloped. 

Healey was commissioned by Crow’s to write The Master Plan. And given the play’s title, it’s a delicious irony that his writing process was more a function of serendipitous magic than intensive planning.  Crow’s Artistic Director Chris Abraham, gave Healey a copy of the 400-page Sideways a few weeks before it was published. Like many Torontonians, Healey had “a casual, newspaper-reader’s relationship with the story” of the city’s aborted dalliance with Sidewalk Labs. He soon became engrossed because “Josh’s book does a great job of making the people come alive, describing the dynamics between the Americans and Canadians, and bringing out the ways the project was strained from the beginning.” 

Engrossed turned into excited: “I don’t know why, but I had an immediate sense of the story I wanted to tell.” This was odd for Healey because “I usually need a year or two of mulling before I decide what the story is, and then more time to figure out how to tell it.” But with The Master Plan, he started at the beginning and wrote the show straight through. He “knew what the narrative content of each scene would be, as well as what the ‘game’ of each scene might be.” Greasing this alchemical fast path was the (also unusual) fact that “I was consulting with Josh and other involved folks as I was writing, and Chris Abraham had similarly clear ideas immediately about the staging.” 

As a result, almost from the outset, “Chris and I were talking about the show getting up quickly, in the very first slot of the season.” All in all, this process for transmuting Healey’s meticulously researched work of non-fiction into a two-hour-plus play was unusual and almost certainly “unreproducible”: “We just got lucky.”

Watching The Master Plan is a complex audience experience, akin to training your gaze on recent history through a spinning theatrical kaleidoscope. At the start of each act, audiences are told that the work is fictional.  “I wanted to insist people approach it as fiction simply to free us all from the expectation of documentary,” explains Healey. But these arch disclaimers are often difficult to heed. The events dramatized are recent, and the day-by-day timeline is meticulously reinforced with flashing date stamps.  Actual emails are excerpted and shown, and portions of actual public speeches are performed.  And many of those depicted are real people whom we know a lot about, such as then-Mayor John Tory, still-PM Justin Trudeau and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. And at the same time, we meet real but lesser-known characters like planner Meg Davis (Philippa Domville) and Kristina Verner (Tara Nicodemo) of Waterfront Toronto (the Toronto government agency that worked directly with Sidewalk Labs) – and we are told that they work at the agency to this day.

So despite the reminder to keep our fiction glasses on, watching The Master Plan at times does feel – at times – like watching a documentary. And the cognitive dissonance is by design: Healey wanted “a slightly destabilizing effect for an audience that’s fun and useful”.  In fact, he explains, “almost all decisions I made were in the service of fun“. (From this wellspring – clearly – sprang the hilarious non-human narrator (Peter Fernandes) and over-the-top elements such as a particularly memorable scene involving a cake.) Healey knew that “most people already have a point of view about these events”. And since this was not a de novo story, he “wanted to make an audience approach the events with fresh eyes, to the extent possible.”  The fast-moving, deeply funny play — mounted at Crow’s on a sleek, technology-enabled, game-like stage (think Catan in the round) – refracts core historical facts through a tonal diversity and a long-term, big-picture view that complicate our responses. 

One of those responses may related to just how Toronto-specific the play is. The trenchant, often hilarious enactment of city council politics and urban bureaucracy has a real “inside baseball” feel. It’s a truism that all politics is local – so will The Master Plan have resonance for non-Toronto audiences? Healey has no idea: “When The Drawer Boy, a play about southern Ontario farmers, written specifically for the Blyth Festival,  started making its way around the world, I gave up guessing which audiences will like which jokes.” He feels on safer ground arguing for the global essence beneath the play’s local trappings: “I think bureaucracy is universal, I think public service is universal, I think everyone understands the Canada/USA dynamic. I think the imperatives around sustainability and affordability are extremely present questions.” So yes, Toronto’s overdone penchant for NIMBY planning and hand-wringing consultation come in for deserved scrutiny in The Master Plan. But this is more than a one-note satire: “I think public servants who stick their necks out to try to solve the hardest questions of our time are heroic. But I’m more than happy if a viewer’s takeaway from the show is more complex than that.”

One big argument for extracting bigger lessons from The Master Plan is Healey’s choice to situate the story within the context of the existential urgency created by two issues that dominated 2023 new cycles in Toronto:  the climate emergency that blanketed the world in wildfire smoke; and the crisis of housing availability and affordability. “The Stop Google campaign did such a good job of focusing us all on how profound the data harvest was going to be at Quayside,” Healey explains. This meant that privacy and big tech needed relatively less focus within the play. But when Google exited Quayside, we were tossing the innovative, sustainability-focused baby out with the surveillance economy bathwater: “We need a hundred projects where smart people are innovating on climate and housing, and we needed them decades ago.” 

The Master Plan is an example of the right story, making its way to the stage at the right cutting-edge theatre company, at exactly the right time in the history of our city and our planet. And that is no accident. There may not have been a master plan for exactly how to write and stage this non-fiction work as a play – but there was deep insight, belief and vision: “I want to say that Crow’s Theatre and Chris Abraham took a real chance programming a play that largely didn’t exist when programming decisions had to be made. Most of a Canadian artistic director’s life is about keeping the lights on and not destroying the finances. Chris (and his board) embraced the risk involved here, and I’m glad it’s paying off for them.

The Master Plan has been extended for a third time until October 19, 2023. Reserve tickets online at crowstheatre.com.

© Scott Sneddon, Sesayarts Magazine, 2023