When Graham Isador’s “Truck” premiered at the SummerWorks Festival two years ago, his speculative fiction about the last truck driver in North America was set in 2038.
However, in this latest production of his “Black Mirror”-esque drama, which opened Wednesday at Factory Theatre, Isador has moved the action up by six years. We’re now in 2032, less than a decade from now.
This change, though small, makes sense. Every day, it seems the far-fetched future we could only dream about years ago is approaching at an unrelenting, ever-increasing pace.
In fact, I got the sense from “Truck” that each of the events depicted onstage could very well unfold in real life today.
Alan Moxley (Craig Lauzon), a 15-year veteran of the long-haul trucking industry, is on strike with his friend Nathan Dalton (Tim Walker), a fellow trucker and the boisterous leader of the picket line. But when Alan is called in by a company executive (Ellie Moon), he’s handed an offer that amounts to something of a Sophie’s choice.
The strike is futile, he’s told. In eight days, every major trucking company on the continent, including Alan’s, is set to announce that they’ve struck a deal with the tech giant Edison to replace all their vehicles with self-driving trucks, leading to mass layoffs for all existing truckers.
Edison, however, needs one trucker to help with the transition — a former driver who will introduce the new fleet of vehicles at an upcoming investor conference, thereby helping to soften the company’s image and ease any public concern. If Alan accepts the offer, he knows he’ll betray his friends and colleagues. But he’ll also be $250,000 richer.
Lauzon delivers a deeply honest and sympathetic performance as Alan, a typically reserved, nonconfrontational man who’s torn over what to do. And Isador’s efficient script, clocking in at a brisk 60 minutes, does a fine job of developing Alan’s character.
The playwright also asks important, timely questions throughout: How does an individual’s job help form their sense of identity? How far are companies willing to go to serve their bottom line? And how far are we, as individuals, willing to go to serve our own interests?
It’s clear Isador, now a journalist with the Globe and Mail, has drawn upon his personal experiences to craft this speculative fiction. In the program, he notes how the introduction of generative AI technologies like ChatGPT upended his copywriting work. “Overnight, my job went from penning pithy holiday ads to editing the work of a robot,” he writes. “When my contract came up, it was not renewed.”
The scenes with Alan and Nathan are especially engrossing: incisively probing yet always still buoyant. Isador, who also directs, keeps the staging simple, with nothing more than a few tables, folding chairs and black blocks.
But “Truck” is uneven in its structure, hitting some rough road in the moments when Alan and Nathan aren’t onstage. Moon’s character, a self-observed, Musk-type figure, is drawn and played so broadly that she almost resembles a persona out of a “Saturday Night Live” sketch poking fun at corporate greed.
I do believe Isador has some important points to make about the dangers of corporate America’s insidious embrace of new technologies, no matter the (often human) costs. But those points rarely ever land in this production, one that vacillates too wildly in tone.
There’s also an eleventh-hour twist in Isador’s play that’s frustratingly unearned and, worse, comes across like a minor betrayal to the development of one of the characters. It all leads to an ending that’s surprisingly bleak.
I’ll admit, it’s easy to feel cynical these days about the future of technology. We’re careening down a dangerous path. Where it leads, we can only guess. But I think there’s also hope that, collectively, we head in another trajectory. “Truck” offers us that hope — only then to snatch it away.
