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by Michael Ross Albert, directed by Paolo Santalucia

Crow’s Theatre, Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto

November 20-December 19, 2024

Sam: “This is the last nice house in Toronto”

Crow’s Theatre’s latest production is the world premiere of Michael Ross Albert’s large-scale comedy The Bidding War. It is an ambitious undertaking for Albert to write a comedy with a cast of eleven, especially when so many of his previous plays have been quite small – three in The Huns (2019) and Miss (2017) and two in Karenin’s Anna (2014). Yet, Albert manages to keep his multiple plots moving along. The action, in fact, is so frantic that Albert doesn’t give the audience much time to reflect. If he did, they would find that there are major weakness in the play’s structure which collapse on examination.

The premise of the play is that Sam, who has just passed his real estate exam on the second try, is the agent for a childhood friend, June, who wants to sell her Toronto home now that she and her step-mother have inherited it after her father’s death. Sam is holding an open house visited by three potential buyers and one guy who is just looking. During the open house, June, an artist, unexpectedly returns from Berlin, where she has been living, and is shocked to see that the house has been listed at such a low price. June, however, also needs money and agrees to let Sam set the closing date for offers to be midnight of that very day. The pressure of time causes the rivalries among the potential buyers to become nastier, especially when one of the agents, Blayne, decides that she might buy the property herself. Chaos endues bringing traumatic injury and anaphylactic shock in its wake.

Albert’s goal is to demonstrate how competition for property brings out the worst in human behaviour, an exercise that is deeply depressing and only superficially comic. Witty dialogue and amusing character sketches keep the mood light for much of the action, but a sour mood sets in by the end of Act 1 and continues through Act 2. Part of the mood derives from the revelations the characters make in Act 2. Another part derives from information we receive in Act 2 that severely undermines what we were led to believe in Act 1.

In Act 1 we are led to believe that Sam can change the time that June’s house in on the market simply by having her sign a document to that effect. In Act 2 we discover that real estate agents cannot do that. A property would have to be withdrawn from the market and relisted and since this property has two owners, June and her step-mother, both would have to approve it. Thus, the means that Albert uses to put pressure on the action could not happen. The practical question is that since there are three other real estate agents present with their clients, why do none of them question Sam’s fraudulent practices until after that damage has already been done. The answer is that Albert needs to delay information about Sam’s actions until later just so his plot will work. This reveals the whole structure of the play as feeble.

We also discover in Act 2 that Sam is love with June and has been in love with her since childhood. Why, then, does Sam list the selling price for the house at less that it is worth? Given that a new development near the house with soon drive up prices, if Sam really wanted to curry June’s favour, her would allow the house to be on the market until it fetched the highest price. Albert wants to show that Sam is caught between love and greed. As we discover in Act 2, Sam is now acting both as an agent for the seller, June, and for a buyer in order to receive a double commission. This is legal in Ontario, but only if both buyer and seller agreed to it in writing. Since this does not happen in the play, Sam is committing an illegal act and the sale could be made void. The problem dramatically is that Albert crams all this information into a small space in Act 2, when he could have made the Sam’s choice of greed versus love the throughline of the play.

Another flaw is Albert’s failure to follow the narrative principle known as “Chekhov’s gun”. The idea is that all irrelevant elements of s story should be removed and if some element is mentioned it must play a significant role in the story. In The Bidding War the equivalent for “Chekhov’s gun” is the collection of sculptures that June has inherited with the house from her father, an artist “famous in Canada”. In the play June’s father is famous enough that one of the potential buyers discovers that, now that the artist is dead, the least of his works is worth $30,000. In Act 2 all mention of June’s father’s works, scads of which are in the basement of the house, is absent. Albert portrays June as impoverished with the sale of the house as her only possible source of income. This is not true. In Act 1 Albert made much of the vast store of wealth that is in the house. Why not have June sell her father’s sculptures? Albert doesn’t want to bring up this possibility because it will not provide him with ending he wants.

Realizing the inconsistencies within the story itself makes a person become unengaged. When a playwright manipulates the flow of information not to reach a logical conclusion but a conclusion he wants in order to make a satiric point, the satire fails because the argument is weak. Albert seeks to distract us from his manipulation by a sequence of surprises, but these include trauma and anaphylaxis which are not at all comic. Any sympathy I had for Albert as a comic writer died when I saw that he stooped to trying to draw humour from his characters’ injuries and afflictions.

What makes The Bidding War watchable is the exemplary work of the entire cast. It is a great collection of actors whose work one can enjoy simply for its ow sake. Director Paolo Santalucia has formed the eleven actors into a tightly knit ensemble and he makes the action move swiftly and precisely with ever-increasing momentum.

At the centre of the action is Peter Fernandes as Sam. His role is rather like that of Francis Henshall in Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors that he played at the Shaw Festival this summer in that Sam has to juggle the demands of the multiple plots he is involved in. On the other hand, Francis has lots of direct address to the audience to explain his feelings, whereas Sam does not. It seems as if Albert would like to muster sympathy for Sam, since he is trying to turn his life around and selling June’s house would be his first major accomplishment. But we know so little of Sam’s motivations that we can’t trust him. Fernandes’s Sam comes off as both comically and suspiciously inept as well as preoccupied with undefined worries.

The most rounded character in the play is Miriam played by Fiona Reid. Reid gives a first impression of a persnickety, technophobic senior who doesn’t seem to know what she wants in a new house. That rather stereotypic portrayal, however, is undermined with a quick-wittedness that picks up on information that the other would-be buyers are too self-involved to notice.

Aurora Browne plays Miriam’s agent Blayne, whom Albert casts as the most obvious villain of the play, a realtor who, contrary to ethics, decides she will bid on the house herself. Browne is excellent at emphasizing Blayne’s haughtiness and sense of self-importance in both tone of voice and general demeanour.

Veronica Hortiguela plays one of the few good people of the piece in the person of June, the artist who has co-inherited the house. Throughout the action we keeping hoping June will overcome her combination of grief, anger and jetlag to see through Sam’s deeds to mount an effective opposition to him and the sale he is artificially trying to hasten.

There are two couples competing with Miriam and Blayne. One is the gay couple of Ian and Donovan represented by Greg, formerly Sam’s tutor. The other is the hetero couple of Lara and Luke represented by Patricia. Both Greg and Patricia are written as essentially good people who are also bland. That gives Sergio Di Zio as Greg and Sophia Walker as Patricia little to work with other than to act as effective sounding boards for their characters’ clients.

Both couples have one member who is enthusiastic (Donovan and Lara) and one who is not (Ian and Luke). Steven Sutcliffe as Ian and Izad Etemadi as Donovan make clear that the bond between their characters is stronger than their differences. Gregory Prest as Luke and Amy Matysio as Lara reveal just the opposite about their characters. The fundamentally left-leaning Luke has a radically different view of capital and property than does his wife, a split that they show only widens as the story progresses.

The mystery man of the show is Charlie, a wealthy jock, who wants to be near the action and who would seem to have no need for a house. Albert as written Charlie as the ultimate narcissist who feels himself superior to everyone else both physically and mentally. Charlie apparently makes a huge amount of money from an OnlyFans account where he insults his viewers even as he masturbates for them. Gregory Waters plays this role to the hilt giving us someone else to dislike along with Browne’s Blayne. Charlie is a mystery because we have no idea why the character is even in the play until near the end.

The seating for The Bidding War is arranged in a U around a central playing area. People thinking of attending should know that Ken Mackenzie and Sim Suzer’s set features a large kitchen island in the northwest section of this area. Crow’s has marked these seats as Tier B and less advantageous than seats in Tier A. Those in the seats behind the island in the northwest section will have to spend most of the play turning to the right to see the action, especially in Act 2 where Santalucia has staged all the activity in the southern half of the area.

Albert can’t seem to decide whether The Bidding War is satire, a black comedy or a farce and as a result the play has no clear tone or point of view. The play is enjoyable on a moment by moment basis as long as one doesn’t try to probe too deeply into the probability of what is occurring. The writing is often very funny although the humour is undercut rather than heightened by the growing animosity the characters express for each other. At intermission I asked myself and my companion whether we were rooting for any of the would-be purchasers of the house. The answer was no. Albert had made none of the individuals or couples appealing enough that we cared whether they succeeded or failed – not exactly the feeling needed to make an audience feel engaged with the play.

Christopher Hoile

Photo: The cast of The Bidding War; Peter Fernandes as Sam and Veronica Hortiguela as June; Steven Sutcliffe as Ian, Sergio Di Zio as Greg, Izad Etemadi as Donovan and Gregory Waters as Charlie; Fiona Reid as Miriam; Amy Matysio as Lara and Gregory Prest as Luke. © 2024 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.crowstheatre.com.