“Statues will crumble. Stories will change. Ideas can last forever.” So argues young go-getter Medusa to the goddess Athena in Erin Shields’ Medusa, now receiving its world premiere at Soulpepper in collaboration with Outside the March.
Medusa’s pitch for trying to effect real change could almost describe the ethos of the Governor General’s Award-winning playwright, who has built her career on fusing the mythological and the modern. Here, it’s particularly apt. After all, Medusa’s gaze turns people into statues. Her story has been rewritten across millennia: from powerful protector to cautionary victim to snake-haired horror. Could the rage that powers Medusa unleash ideas potent enough to outlast these tales?
Shields’ play is formally audacious and consistently riveting. It surprises with its ultimate tenderness, but arrives there only after leaning—hard—into ugliness. This starts with the way director Mitchell Cushman makes our experience of Medusa deliberately disorienting. We don headsets that transmit Medusa’s conflicting self-talk: whispered doubts, self-criticism, and dampened ambition voiced by the other cast members into microphones, whose cords tangle, snake-like, above the stage. It’s the internal cacophony of a woman trying to be heard in a world built to silence her. The concept is compelling, though it doesn’t fully deliver on its immersive promise: the voices are audible without the headsets, making the technology more a symbol than a tool.
But the production finds its abundant power elsewhere. Act One drops an un-monstrous Medusa (a grounded and gripping Oyin Oladejo) in a mythological world overlaid with toxic modern workplace dynamics and systemic social injustice. She has applied for a position at the Temple of Athena, a “temple of innovation” where a coolly superior Athena (Michelle Monteith) dispenses self-satisfied mentorship, and Gord Rand’s oily, predatory Poseidon circles. Amy Keating and Sasha Khan play Medusa’s sisters, grounding them in recognizable women’s struggles like underemployment, motherhood and body image. And by the act’s end, trauma—physical, emotional, and societal—has forged the Medusa of many whispered voices into someone “singular of thought” and “void of contradiction.” She is now pure rage, externally focused.
After this intense origin story, we expect Tarantino-style vengeance, which the show’s promotional poster of baseball bat-wielding Medusa suggests. But Act Two throws a curveball. It reverses the proportions: now we are in a modern business story with mythological overlays, and the job applicant is male, navigating a female-centric workplace. I won’t spoil what happens—just that we turn out to be in a strange direct continuation of the same story. And Danté Prince absolutely shines, delivering exceptional timing and a performance that effortlessly evades stereotypes. (Keating also returns as a taciturn employee, bringing a winning mix of deadpan and nuance.)
Anahita Dehbonehie’s set design smartly differentiates the show’s two halves: tangled microphone cords, plastic curtains and wheeled furniture give way to tactile clutter in the second act. Ming Wong’s costumes mark identity clearly: black robes for the voices-in-head, Greek garb for Athena alone, and shifting modern outfits for the others. Nick Blais’s lighting deploys hard cuts to black, and picks out performers as they prowl the house when the story spills out of Medusa’s head after intermission. And Heidi Wai-Yee Chan’s sound design holds together the production’s twin impulses: cacophony and cohesion.
Even while Medusa finds surprising humour in interpersonal moments, the play catalogues and studies the world’s injustices in lurid and unpleasant detail. These injustices are ragged, violent, pervasive … and gendered. This is why Medusa argues for the cleansing power of rage: it disrupts systems and short-circuits inhibition, making real change possible. But the play challenges her claim, and shocks with the straightforwardness and hopefulness of its counter-proposal.
“Statues will crumble. Stories will change. Ideas can last forever.” Shields bets everything on one idea in particular: that what we’ve been warned will destroy us might be exactly what we need.
I’m not sure if this idea will last forever… but Medusa makes one hell of a memorable case for change.
Medusa runs at Soulpepper Theatre through July 12, 2026. Tickets at soulpepper.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
