Home seller June places sharp, oversized metallic bugs around her gold-embellished Toronto residence. Her late father’s shiny and bizarre insect artwork was created to reflect the ugliness within—and does exactly that for onstage characters brawling over her house in a new Toronto play.

Playwright Michael Ross Albert’s The Bidding War, which premiered at Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre earlier this week, serves as a commentary on the competitive reality of the city’s sky-high real estate market. Tension reaches near-absurdity as the 11-member cast (literally) wrestles over  “the last affordable house” in Toronto. 

When 37-year-old Albert was commissioned by Crow’s Theatre to write a comedy, stories about people struggling to find affordable Toronto homes seemed ubiquitous to him. After a crash course in real estate law and jargon from an agent, Albert set out to “make the stakes as personal and as high as possible” in a play about a bidding war.

“It is about the things people are forced to do, the monsters people are forced to become, when they have to compete with one another for what is essentially a basic human right,” Albert said in an interview.

In real life, more Torontonians are starting to feel the stakes rise again in one of Canada’s most expensive housing markets.

Seasonally adjusted home sales in Toronto rose 14 per cent in October from the prior month, according to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board. But steadily rising home prices in the city have been a years-long trend. Prices have increased around 101 per cent in the Greater Toronto Area over the past decade, and 80 per cent across Canada over the same period.

The impact of rising home prices on different facets of the population is on display during the two-and-a-half-hour play. The audience is thrust into fast-paced dialogue between a multi-generational set of characters. 

There’s the luxury-athleisure-clad gym bro and OnlyFans influencer Charlie (Gregory Waters), who represents the slim minority of gen Zs who can afford to buy a home. Pregnant Lara (Amy Matysio) and her recently laid-off husband Luke (Gregory Prest) are looking for a place to raise their first child. Donovan (Izad Etemadi) and Ian (Steven Sutcliffe) are a middle-aged couple who have worked hard for years to afford a bigger place, and fear interest rates will go up before they get a chance. Elderly Miriam (Fiona Reid) is looking for a place where she can watch her grandchildren—and spends a solid portion of the play on her phone sorting out tech issues.

The characters in Albert’s play are primarily in the upper middle class. He says that like most comedies, it makes fun of the bourgeoisie—because they’re “such easy targets”—but does so with sympathy.

“Each of the characters feels the unfairness of the market very potently,” Albert said. “These are people who, in other circumstances, are upstanding, intelligent, morally sound characters. And yet, because of the unfairness of the system that they’re encountering, they find themselves behaving in ways they don’t recognize.”

All of the characters at the open house have “skin in the game” and can afford to buy a home. When the idea of renting as an alternative to purchasing the property is brought up, the characters scoff at it. And they’re allured by the residence’s individuality amid a glut of look-alike condos in the city.

There’s also an offstage conflict hanging overhead: a nearby building that houses low-income people is set to be torn down and replaced by high-rise apartments and shopping centres. It heightens the stakes for the bidding war, as prospective homebuyers anticipate the value of the home to rise alongside the neighbourhood’s inevitable gentrification.

“It really does make fun of those who are able to strive for a house regardless of their demographic, while emphasizing that this is a rapidly shrinking group of people who are able to actually compete for homeownership,” Albert said.

Other contentious aspects of the play, like landlord rights, have sparked audience debate after curtain close, Albert said. Realtor Greg (Sergio Di Zio) has been holding onto an investment property and can’t evict his tenants who refuse to pay rent. “Nobody cares about landlords,” Greg says on stage, lamenting he’s lost around $30,000 as a result. 

“I’m surprised at how passionately people are affected by these issues,” Albert said. 

The other gen-Z character, June (Veronica Hortiguela), is selling the home and doesn’t seem to think housing is such a big issue. The young artist, who inherited the home from her late father and now needs the cash, is more concerned with other issues like climate change. 

When she brings in existential topics, it highlights the absurdity that the open house has ended in multiple emergency room trips. Her father’s bug artwork looms like a gun on the mantel, leaving the audience fearful that the insect’s pointy features will result in a dire injury. 

The play isn’t really about real estate, Albert said. “It ends up being a play about really desperate people striving for necessities and for a quality of life that they have been promised and denied.”