There are certain playwrights whose works reverberate across centuries — their prophetic narratives and meanings as relevant to the existential condition of today as in antiquity.
Two recent one-person productions in Toronto consider Euripides to be such a sage: Expandido Theatre’s Kill Your Father, a feminist reimagining of Medea, and Talk Is Free Theatre’s Cyclops: A Satyr Play, a queered retelling of his lesser-known comic foray (produced by Panic Theatre).
But rather than directly adapt the texts or merely place them in a contemporary context, I observed that both plays — which, though different in genre and tone, were uncannily similar in their theatrical approach — sought to turn myths on their head by implicating the audience with their in-your-face reinventions whose outcomes still leave me ambivalent.
(I discuss the show’s endings frankly in this double review.)
Translated and adapted by director Marcio Beauclair and Matthew Romatini from a Portuguese-language work by Grace Passô, Kill Your Father opens with Medea (Maria Paula Carreño) lifting up her silky white dress to the audience. A TikTok feed projected onto the skirt features public figures such as Gisèle Pelicot, Jeffrey Epstein, and Donald Trump. “I live here,” she later says, pointing to where the images had been — a world run rampant with unjust violence against women and where exile from one’s homeland is more rule than exception.
The 70-minute monologue finds Medea — a seething mother in the multicultural barrios of Brazil — alternating between telling and showing her life. She offloads her psychic baggage, from the abortion her Syrian neighbour considers having to a patriarchy-induced “fever” plaguing her mind. With a fuzzy, blood-coloured rug pulled out of an ottoman, she reenacts giving birth, and, with Brandon Gonçalves’ stark lighting cues and Julián Nenao’s funky sound design, she relives a sexual assault, all the while anticipating a party her husband will attend.
Throughout the show, punctuated by thunder claps and Brazilian funk beats, Carreño — whose flamboyant facial expressions vividly depict Medea’s fortitude — passionately pounds her chest and grinds her teeth; her acrobatic eyebrows always seem to be on the verge of fusing. With the houselights up, she often scans the audience’s (and critics’) faces, pointing at them, asking questions and pivotally conferring us as “her daughters.” But just when — as in Euripides’ play — she is meant to kill her children as revenge for her husband’s betrayal, a shift takes place.
“It’s time to rethink the angle of this story,” she says. “Review the world.”
In the uneasy scene that follows, which is forewarned in trigger warnings, Medea pulls a handgun out of the ottoman, hands it to an audience member and asks them to shoot the father— our father — when he finally enters. At its boiling point, then, the title becomes a call to action. For a moment, I believed the father would walk through the backdoor of Theatre Passe Muraille’s Backspace and was rather concerned what would happen if the trigger was pulled.
Alas, as in the ancient past, he remains a figure “only present in his absence,” but the play does develop these radical implications that emerge at the end. Out of the felt folds of the enormous, detailed vagina designed by Renaot Baldin that strikingly looms behind her, Medea pulls out a rifle and aims it straight at the audience. Having become acquainted with her grief and involved with her rage, she tasks us with the responsibility to “change the narrative” before firing.
Despite its injunction, the play doesn’t change the father’s fate: it provokes it in us.
When one enters the B Street Arts Hub for Cyclops, the production has turned the space into a fratboy’s backyard where Silenus (writer, director, and actor Griffin Hewitt) lies passed out from a drunken night, a short tail and padded calves lending him goat-like features. Amid crushed red Solo cups, neon bracelets, and sticky notes marked with Cyclops’ eye, he stirs awake and immediately confronts the audience to whom he hazily attempts to recall the preceding events.
After being separated from Dionysus, his venerated master, the enslaved Silenus is trapped on Cyclops’s island, where a fleet of men led by the heroic Odyseuss (visualized by images of Brad Pitt’s portrayal of Achilles in the 2004 film Gladiator) require his assistance to escape. As he cycles through woes and wonders, processing the war in his mind and libido, projections on a screen behind him break up his tale into chapters, displaying the lyrics to Juliette Jones’ classic rock compositions or the Cyclops’ lines (whose brooding voice comes through a speaker).
Like in Kill Your Father, Silenus often hands the power over to the audience, asking them to Google the definition of words such as phronesis (“practical wisdom”) or to choose which songs to sing, meaning the experience of each show will slightly differ. The interactive moments didn’t always land, as when, at the performance I attended, an audience member failed to guess the name on the sticky note on their forehead, but it never halted the 60-minute show’s momentum.
In contrast to Carreño’s severity, Hewitt’s amiable levity — part and parcel of Satyr plays — reminded me of the endless eagerness of stand-up comics. Whereas his cheeky innuendos, double entendres, and open displays of concupiscence were humorous and engaging, the tonal shift of an extended monologue — which the play renders in archaic language that differs from the other parts of the play — lost my attention and I failed to connect with the passage.
But, more pointedly, toward the end of the show, when Silenus is to kill the Cyclops, he, too, experiences a desire for freedom from the myth. “A new option, a new path, a new choice,” he says, looking at us: “I need you to decide for me.” Having watched the plays a week apart, quite uncertain what connections I’d discover between the two, I was suddenly shocked to see such familiar options on screen: do nothing, kill the Cyclops, or kill the hero. “This is your play,” Silenus says to us. “Let me know when you’ve made up your mind.”
He walks down the hall, turns a corner, and, in my experience, a deliberation took place among the 15 audience members. “Kill the monster,” one person suggested and, without any dissenters, this option was quickly settled. But as in Kill Your Father, where no father was killed, it seemed to me antithetical to the crises the plays communicate to make this decision.
“We’re traditionalists,” a man added — proving my suspicion that provocation does not necessarily lead to direct action.
Though these adaptations do their best to appropriate and rewrite texts by Euripides, I found the limitations they inherit still confine them and, instead, give rise to an impulse to engage with an audience who might not be prepared to meet them there — to change the narrative themselves.
No matter: Silenus returned and, with a giant pink dildo in hand, he did what we told him to do.
Kill Your Father runs at Theatre Passe Muraille until April 4 and Cyclops: A Satyr Play runs at B Street Collaborative until April 4.
Nirris Nagendrarajah wrote this review as part of Page Turn, a professional development network for emerging arts writers, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and administered by Neworld Theatre.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Nirris Nagendrarajah
Nirris Nagendrarajah (he/him) is a writer and culture critic from Toronto who writes about literary fiction, film, opera, theatre and himself. In addition to Metatron Press, his work has appeared in MUBI Notebook, Little White Lies, CBC Arts, Literary Review of Canada, The Film Stage, Ricepaper, Ludwigvan, In the Mood Magazine, and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. He is currently part of Neworld Theatre’s Page Turn program and received the 2026 Telefilm Canada Emerging Critic Award from the Toronto Film Critics Association.
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