The Toronto Theatre Review: Erin Shields’ world premiere transforms Greek mythology into an immersive theatrical experience where whispered voices, female rage, and thrilling performances collide
By Ross
The most persistent conversations often happen inside our own heads. Medusa asks, or maybe demands, us to listen to them. Before the space ignites, audience members slip on a pair of headphones and, almost immediately, we begin to hear the thoughts and commands that usually live inside, unheard by most, even when one tries. They whisper, question, contradict, encourage, accuse. They are the snakes inside Medusa’s mind, but they are also unsettlingly familiar, sounding very much like the anxious chorus that lives inside our own heads. And from that moment forward, Erin Shields‘ ambitious new play, produced by Soulpepper Theatre Company and Outside the March and directed with confidence by Mitchell Cushman (Outside the March’s Performance Review), dives into its complex theatrical experiment, determined to pull us inside the head of our heroine rather than simply present her from a distance. It is bold, playful, technically remarkable, and emotionally searching, even if its enormous scope occasionally stretches beyond its reach.
The opening act is where Shields’ vision feels most completely realized. This continues a fascination that has run through much of Shields’ recent work. In productions such as Ransacking Troy and Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary, she has repeatedly returned to familiar myths and stories, reshaping them through the perspectives of the women history has often pushed to the margins. Medusa feels like a natural continuation of that conversation. Oyin Oladejo (Obsidian’s Is God Is) gives her Medusa an intelligence, warmth, and quiet determination that makes her instantly compelling long before mythology transforms her into the monster history remembers. Working inside a corporate satire where Mount Olympus resembles a modern workplace, Medusa becomes an idealistic strategist navigating impossible expectations from the hypnotically commanding Athena, played with astonishing precision by Michelle Monteith (Crow’s Bad Roads), with the seductively cynical Poseidon, played powerfully by Gord Rand (CanStage’s Slave Play), always hovering nearby.
But it is Heidi Wai-Yee Chan‘s immersive sound design that becomes the production’s secret weapon. Serpentine microphones descend from above while the whispering voices stand behind Medusa, illuminated like an otherworldly chorus. Together they transform her inner thoughts into something both beautiful and unsettling. Medusa’s intimate Greek chorus constantly debates every decision, warning, doubting, encouraging, and contradicting. It is one of the most inventive uses of sound I have encountered in recent theatre, transforming internal thought into something audiences physically experience rather than simply imagine. The imagery is as arresting as the sound itself, yet beneath its technical brilliance lies the play’s quiet question: what happens when we hear every voice inside ourselves, but never truly hear one another?
The second act deliberately shifts gears, transporting us into a contemporary rage room where mythology collides with the messy realities of modern life. Here the emotional centre quietly transfers to Amy Keating‘s Annie and Danté Prince‘s Percy, whose awkward warmth grounds a section increasingly occupied with toxic masculinity, privilege, online radicalization, workplace trauma, and gender politics. Shields carries forward the idea of unheard voices in unexpectedly moving ways. Percy repeatedly opens himself up with honest, vulnerable confessions, only to discover Annie has her headphones on and has not heard a single word. Asked what he was saying, he quietly answers, “Nothing.” It becomes one of the play’s most revealing motifs, exposing how often people carry enormous emotional weight while convincing themselves nobody is listening anyway. Medusa herself largely disappears into the story’s architecture, creating a structural separation from the emotional momentum established in the opening act. Even so, the performances never lose their footing. Monteith returns in Act Two, delivering a devastating late monologue about workplace harassment that completely reframes the evening, landing with heartbreaking honesty and leaving both Percy and the audience struggling to process its emotional weight.
Cushman keeps an astonishing number of moving parts in constant motion, guiding a production filled with vinyl curtains, shifting environments, immersive audio, and actors weaving throughout the theatre. Anahita Dehbonehie‘s evolving environments, Ming Wong 黄慧明‘s costumes, and Nick Blais‘ expressive lighting continually support the production’s movement between myth and contemporary realism. However, some of the larger technical transitions occasionally become slightly cumbersome, momentarily drawing attention away from the ideas unfolding beneath them. Yet even when the machinery threatens to overwhelm the storytelling, the production’s commitment to theatrical invention never wavers. Shields has written a play fascinated by contradiction, asking whether women are punished for their anger, whether monsters are created rather than born, and whether justice ever truly belongs to those with the greatest power.
Medusa‘s enormous ambition occasionally leaves some of its richest ideas competing for space. Perhaps those competing ideas reflect the very chaos the play is trying to confront. Rage is rarely tidy, grief is rarely logical, and neither mythology nor modern life offers easy answers. Shields, Cushman, and this exceptional company instead invite us to sit inside the noise, the contradictions, and the impossible choices. After the headphones come off, those whispered voices continue arguing somewhere just beyond our own thoughts, asking whether the monster we fear has simply been trying to tell her story all along.
