Theatre: One-man oligopoly
An ambitious new play about the Rogers succession battle, featuring a cast of one
1. Prologue
I was so impressed by Michael Healey’s last two plays that I asked to attend rehearsals for his next one, Rogers vs. Rogers.
I knew the new play would be based on the book of the same title by Globe and Mail reporter Alexandra Posadzki, whom I had interviewed for the old podcast. I knew it would be about the succession battle at the company where I worked for more than a decade.
Mostly I knew Michael Healey is a rarity among today’s Canadian playwrights because his recent social satires have been situated squarely in the terrain of contemporary Canadian politics. 1979 was about Joe Clark losing the confidence vote that ended his short government. The Master Plan was about Google’s Sidewalk Labs subsidiary trying, and failing, to turn Toronto’s waterfront into a prototype city of the future. It ran for weeks in three separate runs in and around Toronto. It’s been a harder sell outside Toronto, but it just finished a run at Regina’s Globe Theatre.
Healey’s plays are angry, wistful and very funny. They draw crowds. Rogers vs. Rogers opens on Tuesday. Its four-week run sold out fast, plus or minus a handful of seats. A fifth week has been added. It’s selling fast too.
Healey liked the idea of letting me watch the new play find its feet. The team at Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre, where Rogers vs. Rogers begins a month-long run on Tuesday, agreed.
“Rehearsal starts Nov. 3, you could come that day and watch the initial readthru,” Healey wrote. “It will still be early enough we won’t be at each other’s throats.”
Great, I replied. What time would the day start?
Healey: “Typical rehearsal day is 10-6, but we may opt for a 5 hr day given it’s just one actor (who’s still running Macbeth in Stratford).”
I had to read that a couple of times. One actor?
2. The Rogers bundle
In 2017, after more than 30 years of nomadic existence, the Crow’s Theatre moved into a roomy, comfortable permanent home on the ground floor of a condo building in Leslieville, a former industrial neighbourhood east of downtown Toronto. The theatre’s neighbours include a rock-climbing gym, a dentist’s office, a car repair shop and a digital-effects studio.
On the morning of Nov. 3, a dozen people gathered in the complex’s main theatre space. After opening formalities and some ice-breaking conversation among the crew, the play’s entire cast — the Canadian stage veteran Tom Rooney — stood at centre stage and delivered an opening monologue.
“My name is Matthew Boswell,” he said. “I am the Competition Commissioner of Canada.” And then, by God, Rooney-as-Boswell started explaining competition policy, and the sense of betrayal he feels when markets fail.
“Canada was a company before it was a country,” he said at one point. “There is no tradition here of economic dynamism; our tradition is, a thriving business is good for the country, even if it’s bad for the country’s citizens.”
It soon became clear that this play’s Boswell is deeply frustrated by his role as the watchdog of functioning markets in a country where nobody with any power gives a rat’s ass about functioning markets. Even the Competition Act of 1985, “created to help people not get screwed by corporations… contains ways for people to absolutely get screwed by corporations,” Boswell/Rooney said. “This, as the head of the Competition Bureau, is what I’m up against. I get it.
“But this case — this case — Rogers and Shaw, this merger, this seemed like a real moment to take a stand. Letting the second-largest telecom company in Canada swallow the fourth-largest telecom company in Canada? When there’s only four telecom companies in Canada? No goddam way. It seemed obvious to all of us that this would never be allowed to go through….
“Man, did I get fuckin’ shown something that day.”
A minute later, Rooney stooped and slumped into a chair. His voice jumped half an octave and took on a Catalan accent. Suddenly he was Eduardo, the Rogers family’s butler when Edward Rogers and his sisters were growing up. No slide projection on a screen behind Rooney announced this change. Audiences will figure it out.
Soon the character changes were coming fast. Edward Rogers, the heir apparent whose fitness for empire is obvious to nobody but himself. Suzanne Rogers, his wife. Loretta Rogers, his dismissive mother. Martha and Melinda, his sisters and rivals. Three consecutive Rogers CEOs, from Nadir Mohamed to Joe Natale. Rooney — sporting a thick white beard because he still had three weeks as Macduff in Macbeth in Stratford ahead of him — introduced each new character with a change in vocal cadence, a tilt of the head, a quarter-turn from a left-facing to a right-facing stance. In all, Rooney plays 17 roles over the course of the play.
If English-Canadian theatre had stars, Tom Rooney would be one. He has played several of the biggest roles in the repertoire, from Cyrano at the Shaw Festival to Romeo at Stratford to Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie at Theatre Calgary. I wrote about his Hamlet at the National Arts Centre in 2004 for a magazine. Of course he’s also created countless new roles, besides playing the hits. In 2023 he played a black poodle in the Crow’s Theatre staging of the André Alexis novel Fifteen Dogs.
“I keep thinking, ‘I hope this gets easier at some point,’” Rooney told me later during a break. “It’s a lot of material. It’s a lot of material, and it’s definitely the biggest thing I’ve ever done.” This was saying a lot. He’s done Hamlet, after all, who has the most lines in Shakespeare’s longest play, but by my rough math he has twice as many lines in Rogers vs. Rogers as he did in Hamlet.
“I feel like I want to do something that’s hard,” he said when I asked why he took on the challenge. “I do question it. I wake up at 3 a.m., wondering, ‘Can I actually do this? Can I actually get through an entire evening of this?’”
It helps that he likes the script. Rooney and Healey have worked together before, as has each with Chris Abraham, the director. Healey said he had nobody else in mind for all these roles except Rooney.
“I refer to Michael Healey as the Canadian Bernard Shaw, because there’s so much wit and so much intelligence,” Rooney said. “And it’s always so much about who we are at this time. Who we are as Canadians, living in the communities that we live in. He’s an actor as well, so he knows how to write for for an actor. His writing is so rhythmic, it makes sense to an actor. I love his outrage, how he turns it into stories and how he uses humor to make his his points. It’s a bit of a cliche to say, but his writing, I think, really is a gift.”
I’ve known Healey for several years. There’s a walk-on part in his 2017 play 1979 for a Parliamentary intern who shows up to debate, and torment, Prime Minister Joe Clark in the depths of his despair. The intern is Stephen Harper, who would have been 20 at the time. (A slide projected onto a screen behind the actors cheerfully points out that nothing like this encounter ever happened.) Much of Harper’s dialogue in the play is a paraphrase of stuff I wrote in my 2013 book The Longer I’m Prime Minister. That was a strange and not unpleasant experience for a political writer, so I’ve followed Healey’s work ever since.
In 2024 he told me he’d struggled with Posadzki’s fairhanded and dispassionate account of the Rogers succession crisis and the simultaneous Rogers-Shaw merger bid. The story has a lot of characters whom even business-page readers would barely recognize. Some of its central events, like a 2021 “butt-dial” in which Rogers executive Tony Staffieri was said to have accidentally called then-CEO Joe Natale while Staffieri was discussing a plan to push Natale out of the top job, remain in dispute. It was hardly clear what the plot of the story was, or even who it was about.
Healey told me he’d settled on the competition commissioner, Matthew Boswell, as the hero of the story. It felt like a stretch: the Rogers-Shaw merger went through despite Boswell’s best attempts to stop it. Good luck with that, I thought.
What Healey didn’t tell me in 2024, because he probably hadn’t yet decided it, was that the play would use only one actor. So that’s the first thing I asked him about on the first day of rehearsals. Was he trying to produce a smaller, logistically simpler play after The Master Plan’s elaborate sets and big cast?
Not really, Healey said. “Just trying not to bore myself.” The one-man-show thing came out of the demands of the plot. As an actor-playwright, he said he feels “a responsibility to give actors fun, hard things to do.” As a succession battle, the Rogers story is a bit of a dud: Growing up, Edward Rogers is dismissed by everyone, and he kind of buys into that dismissal, but in the end he wins handily, despite his sisters’ rivalry and the company’s internal drama. “That’s not a lot of fun for an actor to do,” Healey said.
Once he decided to make the Rogers-Shaw merger as big a part of the story as the succession battle, Healey realized he’d have two main characters, Edward Rogers and Boswell. “One guy acting in his own interest and one guy acting in the public interest. That’s when I realized, ‘OK, they can be the same actor.’” At that point casting Rooney became obvious. “He’s the country’s greatest clown as well as the greatest tragedian.”
3. “A theft of liberty”
I met Chris Abraham a year ago when he and Healey pried loose a single ticket for me on the last night of Healey’s Toronto waterfront farce, The Master Plan. Even after two runs at Crow’s, one in Hamilton and a final stint hosted by Crow’s putative crosstown rival Soulpepper, Abraham told me the play could have kept running indefinitely. The only thing stopping it was that Crow’s and Soulpepper had other plays they wanted to stage.
So I should not have been surprised when I asked him about his vision for Crow’s Theatre and he replied, not in terms of subject matter, but of audience impact.
“We’re trying to really push past the audience that we have, that see themselves as theatre lovers, and really radically grow an audience [of people] that are ready to fall in love with something new in their life — the live experience,” he said.
“We know that there’s capacity for the not-for-profit theater sector to do a lot better than it’s currently doing. Mirvish Productions, the one big commercial producer in the city of Toronto, does well over 200 million bucks a year in business.” But Mirvish does that by running local productions of Broadway hits — Some Like it Hot, The Sound of Music, jukebox musicals with stories built around hits by Queen or Neil Diamond — as well as heavier plays with some commercial hook, like an upcoming one-man production of Hamlet starring Eddie Izzard.
I don’t get the impression Abraham begrudges the big leagues their big-league sales, he just wants to coax some of those audiences into taking a chance. My ballpark estimate is that Soulpepper does about 5% of Mirvish’s business in a year. If that number could triple it would be a game-changer for locally-produced theatre in Toronto and, eventually, elsewhere in English-speaking Canada. This helps explain why Abraham spent years building an attractive, comfortable home for Crow’s, and why this year his company and Soulpepper announced a strategic partnership that’s all about bigger budgets and longer runs to attract larger audiences.
“I absolutely believe in the intrinsic value of what it is we do,” Abraham said. “It’s become more important in an era in which attention is such a fragile and important commodity now. Theater is a tool to retrain us on deep attention.”
So even as Abraham chases big audiences whose live-theatre experience might so far not extend much past Hamilton, he’s also trying to stage plays with intellectual heft, like upcoming adaptations of Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance and of Michael Ondaatje’s In The Skin of a Lion. He will be encouraged by the example of Rogers vs. Rogers, a play about competition policy that has already, even before it opens, sold more tickets than anything in Crow’s Theatre’s history.
Most of Rooney’s performance is naturalistic and relies only on posture and inflection to sell the multiple changes of character, but at its climax, Rogers vs. Rogers relies on modern technology. This is its depiction of a Rogers Communications board meeting, which took place on Zoom in the middle of a COVID lockdown.
The participants: Edward Rogers, Loretta Rogers, Melinda Rogers, Martha Rogers, the former Ontario premier David Peterson, the eternal Rogers proconsul Phil Lind, and four others. All portrayed by Rooney in the squares of a giant Zoom call. Most pre-recorded, some portrayed live with digital “makeup” to sell the different characters.
While Rooney and Healey looked on, video designer Nathan Bruce demonstrated the techniques he’ll use for the Zoom-call scene. He put a digital mask over his face that tracked his head motions. During the play, the mask will be transparent, with digital makeup and hair effects superimposed. Here’s a bit of video I shot:
But after my day at Crow’s, I kept thinking about Rooney’s opening monologue in character as Boswell, the competition commissioner. First, because competition policy seems a nearly lunatic premise for a play that’s hoping for a big audience. Second, because the Canadian policy debate on competition in Canada is actually enjoying a moment, featuring young and cross-partisan voices at the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, the Public Policy Forum, at The Hub’s Hunter Prize for Public Policy, and in Sutherland Quarterly. Vass Bednar, a co-author of The Big Fix, served as a consultant to Healey on Rogers vs. Rogers, helping him get some of the details right.
So this odd and ambitious play comes along at a moment when much of the country is thinking about its themes. On Dec. 9, 30 people from the federal Competition Bureau will be in the audience for Rogers vs. Rogers. There’s a growing sense that when companies collude to keep prices high and options low, and governments don’t care or can’t help, then the country doesn’t work. But it’s Healey’s character Matthew Boswell who puts it best.
“A company with a large market share takes you, isolates you, and makes you feel dumb,” Rooney-as-Boswell says in that opening monologue. “Cuts you from the herd, gets you alone and gives you the impression you have no choice. And this is, let’s be clear, it’s a loss of freedom… a theft of liberty.
“…Unbridled corporate power isolates you and chips away at that liberty. And watching that happen to people, and watching people believe they have to just take it, without complaint — that makes me mad.”
Rogers vs. Rogers will play at Crow’s Theatre in Toronto through Jan. 4. Click here for information.
I've fixed a bunch of small typos and brain glitches throughout. Writing this took three days, based on notes and recordings from a month ago, and I wish I could catch mistakes before I hit Publish but at least I catch most of them soon after.
Thanks. I really appreciate your arts and culture coverage. There are so few serious feature pieces anywhere. Chris Abraham and Crow's are terrific and so are Michael Healey and Tom Rooney.