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by Grace Passô, translation & adaptation by Marcio Beauclair & Matthew Romantini, directed by Marcio Beauclair

Expandido Theatre Group, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto

March 19–29, 2026

Medea: “I need you to listen to me”

Kill Your Father, as one might guess from the title, is not an easy night out at the theatre. It is a deeply polemical monologue from by Black, lesbian Brazilian playwright Grace Passô. Passô relocates the character of Medea of Greek myth to the present and allows her to express the feelings that led to her turning against her husband Jason and to her notorious act of killing of her children. Colombian actor Maria Paula Carreño-Martínez fully embodies the wrathful woman who urges all women to revolt against their male oppressors.

There are many versions of the Medea myth but the one Passô addresses is the one presented by Euripides in his tragedy Medea (431 BC). Both plays explore Medea’s rage on the day that Jason is to marry the Corinthian princess Glauce. In Euripides, the sorceress Medea, a native of Colchis, has helped Jason obtain the Golden Fleece. In love with Jason, she has travelled with him to Corinth. There Jason divorces her since she is no longer useful to him and seeks the hand of Glauce, daughter of the King of Colchis, a marriage that will advance his political status. In revenge, Medea kills Glauce and then her own two sons by Jason before fleeing to safety in Athens.

In Passô, Medea has no magic powers. She feels the power of Mother Earth as much as any woman could if she were more aware. Passô focusses on Medea’s status as an immigrant and has Medea note the lives of her neighbours who are immigrant women – Cuban, Brazilian, Syrian, American and Chinese. Of these only the American woman disdains her and seems to have internalized the patriarchal attitudes of the men around her. Medea is most sympathetic toward the Syrian woman who wants to have an abortion but doesn’t know how to go about it.

Only partway into the action do we learn that the immigrant woman speaking to us is Medea. Passô clearly wants her Medea to emerge as a representative of immigrant women in general. A second revelation is that we the audience represent Medea’s daughters (no sons in this version). Medea speaks directly to us and moves among us as she implores us to listen to her story. The phrase that she knowingly repeats is “Change the narrative”.

Unlike Euripides’ version, this Medea feels no anger, only pity, for Jason’s new woman and has no desire to harm her. After revelling in the love she once felt for Jason, Passô’s Medea longs only to kill Jason. She reasons that she has the to kill him since she once saved him from death multiple times before. Her strategy is not to kill him herself, but to have one of us, his daughters, kill him, hence the title Kill Your Father (Mata Teu Pai, in the original).

From this moment, we the audience cannot regard the action from a distance. Passô has Medea directly implicate us in the outcome. Nevertheless, the longer Medea meditates on the nature of women, the more doubtful she becomes. She even admits “I have the oppressor’s blood flowing in my veins”. She knows that we do, too. She laments that despite all she has told us, we will seek out a man to marry who is just like Jason. Medea realizes that she will now have to take action herself and assures us that the action she takes will be done out of love.

The hour-long play, now receiving its Canadian premiere, is performed on Renato Baldin’s all-white set dominated by a large carpet on the back wall depicting the vulva. The carpet underscore Medea’s identity as Woman but also holds surprising secrets of its own. Baldin has dressed Medea in a simple all-white gown, with two spirals of braided red yarn, one end of each hanging free, decorating the breasts. Brandon Gonçalves’ drastic lighting changes reflect Medea’s changing moods and Julián Henao’s pulsating music ensures that the tension never slackens even during blackouts.

Maria Paula Carreño-Martínez gives a powerful, intense performance as Medea. Her vocal production ranges from whispers of suppressed rage to shouting and screams releasing that rage if only for a moment. Her depiction of barely contained emotion is always more effective that her explosive passages. What is most impressive are the myriad emotions that play over Carreño-Martínez’ face. Love and hatred, pity and ruthlessness, seems to vie for dominance in her expression before she utters a word.

Passô’s text is repetitive and is performed by Carreño-Martínez as if Medea constantly has to returns to essentials, such as “I am here”, before expounding yet again what she feels and what we should learn from her experiences. It is as if Passô’s Medea wants to dismantle piece by piece all the negative attributes that have gathered around Medea the mythic figure and to see them as the products of a male-dominant, patriarchal culture ready to despise any woman who does not conform to its restrictive view of what women are and can be.

Carreño-Martínez delivers Passô’s poetic text almost musically, as if passages were marked with crescendi, decrescendi, fortissimi and pianissimi. After hearing such a performance it is no surprise to learn that in 2025 Kill Your Father became the basis for a ballad opera by composer Vidal Assis.

As a prologue to Passô’s play, director Marcio Beauclair has videos projected onto the skirt of Carreño-Martínez’ costume of news items about Gisèle Pelicot’s horrendous abuse, about Jeffrey Epstein and about the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the US. These clips demonstrate that despite the gains women have made in achieving equality, men are still ready to deny them rights and to treat them as objects.

Passô’s play has one of the most shocking conclusions of any play I’ve seen. We see that Passô is able to recontextualize her Medea’s surroundings and motives but finds they lead also lead to a horrifying outcome. It is also an outcome replete with irony. It means that Medea’s entreaties “I need you to listen to me” and “Change the narrative” will have no effect unless we the audience realize that we can be more than just Medea’s daughters.

We must be grateful to the Expandido Arts Collective, who brought us Sergio Blanco’s The Rage of Narcissus in 2023, for once again broadening Toronto theatre-goers’ horizons.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Maria Paula Carreño-Martínez as Medea. © 2026 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: expandido.ca.