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written and co-created by Brianna Russell, directed and co-created by Catie Thorne

Sheep’s Clothing Theatre, SummerWorks Performance Festival, co-presented with Outside the March, Delta Upsilon Fraternity, 182 St. George St., Toronto

August 10–15, 2026

Julian: “My life is in your hands, brothers”

There’s an architecture of voyeurism built into Blood Brothers. Before entering the Delta Upsilon fraternity house, just north of the University of Toronto’s St. George campus, audience members are handed white masks designed by Evangeline Dailisan. Their frilled fabric hides our faces and marks us as anonymous outsiders who are free to stare.

We have been granted access to the pressures of loyalty to this closed world — its bedrooms, hallways, and common rooms. It feels as though we’re peering through a keyhole. That uneasy privilege is at the heart of this thrilling production from Outside the March.

The experience can feel like inhabiting a point-of-view shot unfolding in real time. As scenes unfold simultaneously, we the audience move freely and assemble our own visual montage as we go. But what we see is inevitably incomplete, pieced together from whatever interactions and relationships we happen to catch.

Follow Caesar, the fraternity name of Julian (Jonah Paroyan), and you follow a president who prowls the ground floor with supercilious confidence even as others seem intent on turning against him. Follow him into the confines of his bedroom, however, and the performance begins to crack. I caught him trying to confess something involving drugs to his girlfriend, Calpurnia (Heather Thomas), who seemed determined not to hear it. Follow her instead, and you follow a pragmatist bent on solving the problem even at the expense of justice — truly a “future politician,” as Cassius calls her. Cassius (Nick Cikoja), meanwhile, is an acrimonious presence, determined to overthrow Caesar and enlist Brutus (Boro Milosevic) in doing so.

Brianna Russell’s dramaturgy uses the power games of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as a pressure chamber for contemporary fraternity dynamics. It recalls the pressure-cooker psychology of the Netflix series Adolescence in the way it lets us enter and explore the social system producing frighteningly coherent behaviour. Loyalty here is constantly enforced by the fear of exclusion.

Catie Thorne’s direction is especially sharp in the way it alternates these collective scenes with looser stretches in which characters splinter off into different rooms and encounters. Sephora N’Kosi’s lighting follows the shift in mood, with chandeliers moving from white to red as the atmosphere turns more threatening, while the swaggering pop music that had flooded the rooms suddenly falls silent.

We enter the fraternity on initiation night and gradually witness the machinery of rituals and hierarchies that make membership both desirable and coercive. When a crisis erupts, the brothers decide to fabricate a version of reality. Every reconstruction proposed by the leaders — first Cassius and then Marc (Kalon Young), the production’s Mark Antony figure — is justified as necessary to protect the group. When one brother tries to pull away, Marc warns him, with oily calm, that refusing to participate means placing himself outside the fraternity’s protection.

That makes Blood Brothers disquietingly compelling both as political drama and as an experiment in spectatorship.* We move through the house in a state of perceptual disorientation, piecing events together and choosing what to follow and what to leave unseen. Its fragmented perspective gives particular force to a story where political order is at risk and taking sides becomes unavoidable.

But the show also changes the relationship between audience and performance. We are not invited to see the action so much as allowed to peep at it: you can enter a room and find actors already mid-scene, performing for no one. Their lives continue whether spectators are there to witness them or not. In the late 19th-century, French director André Antoine famously let actors turn their backs to spectators and arranged rooms without regard for sightlines, making audiences feel like intruders peering through a missing wall. Antoine would have loved Blood Brothers.

Alessandro Stracuzzi

* Toronto audiences may know that this experiment has been done before. In 1981, Tamara by John Krizanc opened in Toronto in which spectators chose which of ten characters to follow in a story set in a real house. People could follow just one character or switch from one character to another. The show ended when the remaining characters reconvened in the main hall. It became a sensation and is one of the few Canadian plays to enjoy massive success outside Canada. It ran for nine years in Los Angeles starting in 1984. Then it moved to New York where it ran for five years. Other productions occurred in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Rome and Toronto again in 2003. Editor.

Photo: Auguste Kociuba as Portia with ensemble and spectators. © 2026 Audrey Persaud.

For tickets visit summerworks.ca.