The Master Plan
The Master Plan is a play produced by the Soulpepper theatre company. Adapted from the book Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, the play tells the true story of the ill-fated project to develop an unused plot of Toronto land into a futuristic “smart city.”
The project would have been a collaboration between Sidewalk Labs (a subsidiary of Alphabet), and a government agency. Predictably, the opposing forces of profit-driven capitalism and regulatory bureaucracy ended in a stalemate, and the project was scrapped. The public generally disapproved of the idea, because of understandable fears that residents of the neighbourhood would be spied on, their data sold for profit. Nobody knows if data privacy would have been a real issue, because the project never got very far; on the other hand, even if the project had started off in a benign way, the pattern of enshittification predicts that the lives of the “customers” would have eventually deteriorated due to the profit motive.
As you can see, the real-life story was complex and fascinating, and I think that The Master Plan is an ambitious attempt to adapt it for the stage. It asks a lot of the actors, who have to recite extended sequences of background information about the timeline of events and the various executives and politicians who were involved. I give the performers a lot of credit for keeping all of it straight, while delivering their lines with energy.
However, I felt that the sheer amount of information was ultimately a flaw of the play. There’s a dedicated narrator character who stands off to the side of the stage, whose role is to serve exposition. (“The person speaking is so-and-so, a former manager at blah blah…”) Sometimes, the characters in the scene exit to the side of the stage, and become narrators as well. I think the writers wanted to mix it up, and avoid having a single narrator speak a really long monologue. Even the scenes themselves are filled with minutiae, with many boardroom meetings where deals are negotiated, and characters yell at each other about the rules and regulations of land procurement.
The play makes a point of reminding the audience that it’s fictionalized, via text that appears on the screens mounted above the stage. (Screens which, I might add, are also used to show PowerPoint-like slides with corporate org charts and timelines, etc.) In my opinion, they should have dramatized it further, and focussed on the human side of the story. To me, much of the content of the play would have worked better as a documentary or a podcast. I would have liked to experience how the situation affected the lives of the people involved, and how they felt about it. I think that the copious amounts of background information could have been boiled down to the essentials, in order to tell a more character-driven story.
