New play asks what happens when technology comes for all our jobs

It may seem very of the moment, but the new play, Truck — about a retirement speech by America's last truck driver some time in the near future — actually predates the current artificial intelligence boom by several years. Playwright Graham Isador has been working on the script in one form or another for eight years.

Originally, he says, it started life as a theatre workshop monologue — a meditation on how our personal identities get wrapped up in what we do for a living, and what happens when a machine takes over one of the things that makes you you. But the work started to feel more and more relevant as time went on.

"I wrote that thing sort of as a fictional, pontificating thing… but more and more over the last eight years the themes in that monologue became really relevant," he says.

It also became more relevant to Isador personally. In addition to being a playwright, he's also a journalist — including producing the podcast Short Sighted for the CBC — and for many years, made the bulk of his living as a copywriter. Over the past couple years, he saw copywriting work dry up as clients turned to ChatGPT and other AIs, in spite of the fact that, to Isador, none of what they're doing "is any better than what a human can do. But for a lot of companies, it's good enough."

Truck became less of a "pontificating thing" and more of a way for Isador to work through his own fears.

"If all those jobs disappeared, what happens next?" he says. "So it's a fear that I was feeling very much myself, like, on a kind of existential level with AI, and it's also something that I've noticed that's coming up more and more in these other industries."

But as personal as the project became, Isador wants to make it clear that Truck is also about the future of work as a whole, for all of us.

"There's a lot of myself and some of my own thoughts within this play," he says. "But there's also stuff that's coming up about the idea of the future of work and unionization and how bigger corporations can put the profits before what humans are doing for them. So it was stuff that I was seeing between Amazon workplaces and how those companies have kind of changed the way that people are monitored."

Isador put on a staged reading of Truck back in 2023 as part of Toronto's Summerworks festival. The reading sold out and garnered enough positive reviews to convince Isador that the project "had a bit of legs."

"As an independent theater producer, it means that you really have to believe in the work and believe it can sell and believe what you're making is really important," he says. "And that reading in particular, that gave me the gusto to be able to follow that… the feedback that I'd gotten just from talking to people afterwards and the emails that we got later, really praising the work were enough for me to kind of be able to pursue this"

Putting on a play like this as an independent producer is challenging says Isador. He's gotten a thousand dollars in grant money, but other than that, he's had to "beg, borrow, and steal" to get the production to the stage. The Factory Theatre, who are co-producing the show, donated rehearsal space. Ultimately, though, Isador has stuck with it because he feels Truck is a play whose time has come. 

"What I'm always trying to do with my work is figure out, 'Why now?'" he says. "And the answer to that, a lot of the time, can be like, 'Well, I think it's good, or I think it's funny or I'm really enjoying this' but… this one in particular just feels like it's the time for this play."

Truck runs March 26-30 at The Factory Theatre (125 Bathurst St.) in Toronto.