REVIEW: The Bidding War is a Lear-worthy extravaganza of housing hell
iPhoto caption: The Bidding War production still by Dahlia Katz.
The day before the opening of The Bidding War, Michael Ross Albert’s riotous dark comedy at Crow’s Theatre about the rotten core of our current housing crisis, I awoke to a de facto eviction notice. A 35-story apartment building is soon to rise where my home once stood, pushing me into a manic market on a strict deadline.
Albert’s feisty and sardonic script couldn’t have felt more topical, the cynical song in my heart duetting misanthropically with its rapid-fire satire. Aided by a fantastic cast, director Paolo Santalucia’s production covers a 24-hour bidding period for “the last nice house in the city” which turns into a King Lear-worthy extravaganza of scheming, backstabbing, and violence.
“Can I tell you what I love about this house?,” practices newly-licensed realtor Sam (Peter Fernandes), as he busily puts out trays of canapes on the trendy kitchen island of Ken MacKenzie and Sim Suzer’s sleek set, the inside of a newly renovated house staged with neutral hues and abstract art to increase appeal. The house currently belongs in part to Sam’s high school friend June (Veronica Hortiguela), a bohemian artist mostly living in Germany, who he’s desperately trying to impress; Fernandes charms as the bumbling, conniving lifelong loser, skidding on gray wood floors as he tries to keep things together.
An open house is perfect fodder for a farce, which the production gleefully embraces in the first act before it becomes something still entertaining but darker. Santalucia and fight director Anita Nittoly stage the mayhem with assurance, conversations converging and clashes ensuing as characters emerge from and disappear into the bedroom, basement, and backyard.
Albert’s caricatures of city homebuyers and realtors are exaggerated, but only barely; whining and jockeying for position, they all display their most venal tendencies as the claws come out.
The realtors swarm like jackals around their willing prey, pitting them against each other to earn more commission — or, perhaps, a place for themselves in the neighbourhood, gentrifying rapidly via forced displacement of low-income families. Aurora Browne’s Blayne, a swaggering villain secure in her right to take what’s hers, seems the shadiest, but none come away clean.
Their clients are no better. May-December gay couple Donovan (Izad Etemadi) and Ian (Steven Sutcliffe) are the best of the lot, Donovan falling in love with the backyard tree as a puppy oasis, while Ian claims they deserve the place to make up for a lifetime of discrimination. Sociopathic fitness bro Charlie (Gregory Waters), whose only human emotion — is flexing an emotion? — seems to be the joy he gets from making money by humiliating online devotees, wants to chop said tree to make room for a hot tub.
Fiona Reid is hilarious as the hapless, blunt Boomer Miriam, who doesn’t know how to call an Uber, but has a large nest egg from the house she’s owned for 40 years. Luke (Gregory Prest) and Lara (Amy Matysio), tellingly named like a famously turbulent soap opera couple, seem minutes away from delivering their first child; both leftist crusaders, he’s an unemployed journalist and she’s a sellout to Amazon Prime’s documentary unit. Wielding her protruding belly as both shield and weapon, Matysio makes doe eyes that hide the wolf inside at anyone who might take this house away from Lara’s unborn child.
Albert’s hard-hitting, relevant themes examine ownership in a world where we increasingly have to pay simply to exist, questions of who deserves comfort, and generational conflict between boomers trying to live their lives and millennials angry that they never got a chance at that same lifestyle. Ultimately, it’s not about the house; it’s about a sort of cosmic fairness that has never existed, and how we might feel justified in tipping the scales in our favour after seeing the unscrupulous get rewarded again and again.
As the play darkens, the characters grow more grotesque. Many both symbolically and literally disfigure, from one character’s animalistic run up the stairs on all fours to another’s swollen jaw that renders speech nearly impossible. Seeing the space swarming with the scuttling human scavengers, June brings out her father’s giant metal bug sculptures from the basement to complete the mini Metamorphosis.
Appropriately, that beautiful tree in the backyard, represented by a single branch that juts over part of the in-the-round audience, is dying. The bleak third act, which transplants the action to that backyard, similarly offers little comfort, because little comfort exists. It’s lucky that the whole endeavour is funny as hell, because this hell needs some humour.
Just let me know if any of you have a lead on a nice house in Toronto.
The Bidding War runs at Crow’s Theatre until December 15. Tickets are available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
Ilana Lucas
Ilana Lucas is a professor of English in Centennial College’s School of Advancement. She is the President of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association. She holds a BA in English and Theatre from Princeton University, an MFA in Dramaturgy and Script Development from Columbia University, and serves as Princeton’s Alumni Schools Committee Chair for Western Ontario. She has written for Brit+Co, Mooney on Theatre, and BroadwayWorld Toronto. Her most recent play, Let’s Talk, won the 2019 Toronto Fringe Festival’s 24-Hour Playwriting Contest. She has a deep and abiding love of musical theatre, and considers her year working for the estate of Tony winners Phyllis Newman and Adolph Green one of her most treasured memories.
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