Soulpepper’s ‘Medusa’ unleashes female fury — but the rage gets tangled in the machinery

Now playing at Soulpepper, Medusa reimagines the Greek myth as far more than the story of a monster deemed so dangerous she must be beheaded. For much of the first act, Oyin Oladejo plays her with painful amiability, an obliging smile fixed in place as her idealism curdles against an unyielding institution.

The result is a fierce if overburdened premiere built around a timely dilemma: how can resistance withstand power?

As the third of six Toronto premieres in what Shields has called her “reaping season,” the play sits firmly in the Governor General’s Award-winning playwright’s signature mode: transforming ancient myths into contemporary arguments about power.

Here, Medusa becomes Athena’s assistant, hired into the very hierarchy that will eventually destroy her. With Anahita Dehbonehie’s pristine white furnishings and desk chairs, Olympus feels less like a mythological realm than a glossy corporate office. Medusa tries to steer it from within, only to learn that injustice is not a glitch in the system but its design.

For all her command, Athena remains trapped inside the patriarchal order she serves. Michelle Monteith plays her with calculated authority, shoulders squared beneath a heavy aegis that reads as both armour and corset. Gord Rand’s Poseidon, by contrast, carries no such burden. Draped in a translucent baby-blue scarf (costumes by Ming Wong), he swans with wave-like ease and the serene confidence of entitlement.

Drawing on Outside the March’s taste for experiential theatre, director Mitchell Cushman turns Medusa’s unraveling into an immersive experience. Before the performance begins, two actors demonstrate how to wear the alien-like headphones attached to the backs of our seats, promising intimate access to the Gorgon’s inner life.

The conceit is evocative: the ensemble moves through Dehbonehie’s tangle of black ropes, their voices transmitted directly into our ears as the snakes inside Medusa’s mind. But the effect soon becomes less psychological than chaotic. Voices merge, overlap and pile up, producing not psychic torment so much as theatrical traffic. The microphones keep shifting purpose — carrying Medusa’s thoughts, the gods’ commands and even a baby’s cry — until the device meant to draw us closer instead creates distance. Muddled staging further weakens the effect, with performers often appearing entangled and ill at ease.

It is once the headphones are gone that the production cuts more sharply into a harsher reality. The second act returns us to the human world, where Medusa has opened a rage room. Women arrive to smash the social scripts that have confined and diminished them, choosing from a customizable catalogue of targets: the pretty little home, the frat house, the nursery, and so on. From the tech booth, Medusa presides over their destruction, urging on their fury by voiceover.

But Shields is too intelligent a playwright to mistake catharsis for change. The rage room is thrilling but messy. It unleashes outbursts for a few shattered seconds before leaving wreckage for someone else to clean up. Enter two housekeepers: flighty Annie (Amy Keating) and feminist-minded Percy (Danté Prince), a cheeky nod to, of course, Percy Jackson.

Percy gives the baggy script its clearest counterweight: sympathetic to Medusa’s cause but wary of her methods. His moral compass points towards nonviolent protest. But if Medusa must reckon with the blowback of rage, Percy must confront the limits of pacifism in a violent system.

At its best, Shields’s Medusa knows that no form of resistance comes away clean. Every choice leaves bruises. That finds its sharpest expression in Monteith’s exquisite second-act monologue as one of the rage room’s clients. She has refused the bargain of workplace harassment and ended up isolated. In a loose grey cardigan, Monteith pares her voice to a thread, arms hanging heavily at her sides, as though slackened by powerlessness.

For all the production’s clutter, that defeated body cuts through. It does not need headphones, ropes or theatrical machinery to bring us close. For a few minutes, her words confront us with the agony of injustice, turning the audience to stone.