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It’s basic human nature: we use humour to cope with adversity.
So, it was only inevitable that someone would satirize Toronto’s out-of-control housing crisis. After all, we’ve whined about it. We’ve pulled our hair out over it. A whole generation has given up on the dream of home ownership because of it. At this point, what more is there to do than just laugh?
Michael Ross Albert provides those laughs in spades. His new play, “The Bidding War,” which opened Wednesday at Crow’s Theatre, is an uproarious satire of not only the state of Toronto housing but also the sheer absurdity of it all.
The playwright pulls no punches in this timely comedy, featuring a terrific ensemble who portray a gaggle of agents and prospective buyers, circling the house at the centre of the play like vultures waiting to pounce on their prey.
These are larger-than-life caricatures, no doubt. The incompetent sales rep Sam (Peter Fernandes) is the conductor of this comedy of errors, well out of his league as he’s up against his fellow cutthroat agents (played by Sergio Di Zio and Sophia Walker).
One of these ethically questionable realtors, Blayne (Aurora Browne), altogether ditches her client so she can throw in her own bid for the property. That elderly woman she abandons is Miriam (a standout Fiona Reid), a discerning grandmother looking to downsize from her five-bedroom house into something (slightly) smaller. She may be a technological Luddite wearing a brace on her right arm, but she’s far feistier than she initially appears.
There are other birds of prey, too: Charlie (Gregory Waters), a buff gym rat who earns money from an OnlyFans side hustle; a married couple (Steven Sutcliffe and Izad Etemadi) who are looking to move out of their cramped apartment; and soon-to-be parents Luke and Lara (Gregory Prest and Amy Matysio).
Albert spares no one as he skewers these bourgeois types. (I couldn’t stop laughing when he reveals that Luke is in fact a crusading journalist recently laid off by Metroland and now running his own Substack.) But there’s also something more insidious beneath this humour, as Albert offers a burning critique of our primal selfishness, and how we attach so much of our worth to the property we own.
Director Paolo Santalucia milks the comedy out of the text and efficiently steers the large cast on Ken Mackenzie and Sim Suzer’s set, a stunning replica of a single-family home.
Albert’s first act, though long, is theatrical gold. He establishes early on that the stakes are high: the house is about to shoot up in value once a nearby low-income apartment building is redeveloped into a shopping plaza. So, obviously, everybody wants in.
Complications arise, however, when the seller, Jane (Veronica Hortiguela), crashes the open house, livid after learning that it’s her old high school classmate Sam who’s been tapped by her stepmother to list the property, after Jane’s father dies.
Albert works hard for the laughs. And though “The Bidding War” ultimately earns them, the jokes all become a bit laborious. There’s nothing subtle here, with the insults, taunts and shouting matches soon bleeding into one another.
Structurally, too, Albert’s play suffers from a second-act slump. So juicy is his premise that he then has trouble finding a place for it to all land, once the blood has been drawn and the tears have been shed.
While the first act builds to a madcap climax and grows hilariously more absurd in the process, like a housing bubble that stubbornly refuses to pop, the second half disappointingly deflates. Instead of leaning into his ridiculous narrative, Albert leaves us with a conclusion that’s too moralizing and too quiet for the chaos that precedes it.
In a way, though, that’s almost fitting for a story about Toronto’s real estate crisis. “The Bidding War” scales such comedic heights in the first act, that it’s left with nowhere to go. And while we don’t get a spectacular crash, neither do we get much of a satisfying closing.
English