The Toronto Theatre Review: Expandido Arts Collective’s punk-drama pulses with rage and poetry, but struggles to shape its own intensity
By Ross
“Rewrite the narrative“. That is the driving force behind Kill Your Father, the blistering, confrontational one-person show now taking over the Backspace at Theatre Passe Muraille that grabs hold with urgency and refuses to let go. First staged in 431 BC, Medea remains one of the most enduring and unsettling works in the theatrical canon, a story of injustice and ruthless revenge centred on a woman who transgresses from mother to anti-mother through the unthinkable act of killing her children. She is both a societal warning and a forbidden fascination, a figure who challenges patriarchy while existing inside a theatrical tradition originally performed by men, and for men alone.
Grace Passô’s Kill Your Father does not even attempt to follow that inherited structure. It is not simply a reinterpretation of that legacy. It confronts it head-on. Presented by Expandido Arts Collective, this punk-infused reimagining redirects Medea’s violence away from her children and toward the mythical Jason, reframing the tale as an act of resistance against patriarchal authorship itself. The story is not retold. It is seized with both bloodied fists and forcefully rewritten.
Performed with ferocious commitment by Maria Paula Carreño, this Medea exists in exile, surrounded on all sides by displaced women whose lives are marked by war, abandonment, and systemic violence. Their shared space becomes a volatile landscape of competing histories and tensions, particularly in Medea’s pointed contempt toward a woman from the United States, whose perceived superiority exposes hierarchies that persist even within marginalized communities. It is a fractured world, and that instability pulses through every moment of the performance.
Carreño rarely allows the energy to settle. She moves with urgency and force, her body and voice locked in a constant state of agitation as heartbeats, explosions, thunder, and jagged musical cues drive the piece forward. Medea’s rage is redirected with clarity. “I wish her no harm,” she tells us of Jason’s new partner, shifting the focus away from centuries-old expectations and toward the man who has authored her anger and her story. This, she insists, is the “most maternal act” imaginable, and in that moment, we believe her.
There is something almost operatic in the way the play circles its central ideas, returning to them again and again with mounting intensity. Medea insists that this act, this violent rewriting, is a reframing that seeks to transform destruction into protection, rupture into possibility. The conceptual shift is striking, even in repetition. Her daughters are no longer casualties of patriarchal legacy, but its undoing, inheritors not of trauma, but of resistance. It is a compelling and often powerful reimagining, one that interrogates the assumptions that have shaped this story for centuries.
Yet the production’s central challenge emerges from that same repetitive impulse. Without variation in tempo or tone, the formula begins to flatten rather than build. Ideas are revisited so frequently, and at such sustained intensity, that their impact starts to blur. What should land as sharp and dangerous instead diffuses. The anger is ever-present but increasingly indistinct in its shape.
Director Marcio Beauclair (TPM’s The Rage of Narcissus) leans fully into that fury, sustaining a level of emotional extremity that, over time, overwhelms rather than escalates. The language is visceral and often striking, filled with poetic declarations that demand attention, but without contrast or stillness, its force diminishes. Moments that hint at greater precision and depth struggle to emerge within the constant storm.
The design elements support the vision with clarity. Renato Baldin’s minimal set anchors the space, while Brandon Gonçalves’s lighting and Julián Henao’s sound are deployed with precision to heighten key moments. The visual language is bold and unapologetic, reinforcing the production’s refusal to soften its message.
Kill Your Father is a work of urgency and undeniable conviction, one that demands to be heard and refuses to be ignored. It challenges one of theatre’s oldest myths with fire and purpose, and its intentions are never in doubt. But by sustaining that fire at a single, unrelenting heat and pitch, never a whisper, it ultimately undercuts itself. What begins as a battle cry risks becoming simple noise, and in that loss of shape, the very ideas it fights to sharpen slip from our grasp.
