A Lack of Variation Makes for a Long Way
Colin MacLean

Miss Margarida is the teacher who returns in our worst nightmares. To some degree or other, I suspect most of us spent a year with Miss M. and, as the lady herself chillingly observes at the end of the play, “I will always be with you.”

Miss M. (Linda Grass) has a lot of problems. She hates us and is obviously (and unsuccessfully) wrestling with her demons in front of her hapless Grade 8 class (the audience). “Straighten up,’ she barked at me straight off. “Where do you think you are – in a brothel?”

Needless to say, I sat bolt upright for the rest of a Northern Light Theatre’s Miss Margarida’s Way.

She’s an equal-opportunity bigot spewing her hatred over aboriginals, gays and religion in equal measure all the while assuming the position of omnipotent autocrat. She says she is going to teach us biology but her main obsession is control, and she never gets much beyond that.

Here at the beginning of the school year, your heart goes out to the kids who will get a variation of Miss M. – because she IS out there. Kids just get trapped in a situation like this and, as she crows, “You are here because your parents made you come.”

Miss M. invites participation but woe betide any student who volunteers. On the night I was there, few were willing to place their heads into that buzz saw.
“I hate injustice,” she bellows. “I will kill anyone who practices injustice.”

She keeps insisting that what we want is a sex education class but she won’t give it to us. Good thing, too, because this is one screwed-up lady. “You are all going to die,” she snarls. “I want each of you to write a paper describing your own funeral.”
She writes naughty words on the blackboard.

We watch her come apart until at the end she conflagrates.

But we get most of this in the first 15 minutes. After that, Miss Margarida’s way is long indeed.

She starts off with a simper, builds to a pinched scream, realizes what she is doing and subsides. To begin again. Like real students, theatergoers may begin to look forward to the bell signaling the end of the class.

To be fair, the audience I saw the play with laughed for most of its length despite the sameness of the material.

I think originally this work was meant as a satire on how we grow to accept despots but the dialect is murky and the metaphorical insights one-dimensional.

Glass is a fine actress but even she (and director Trevor Schmidt) can’t find enough variation to keep us interested. Ms. Glass is certainly in the moment but there are lots of moments in these two long hours.


Miss Margarida’s Way runs through Oct. 1 at Northern Light Theatre’s space (11516-103 St).


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Lesson for Today
Miss Margarida seethes pedagogy
Eva Marie Clarke

Slim, ominously attractive, the biology teacher slinks into the harshly lit classroom. The typically frumpy teacher’s wardrobe is transmogrified into an ensemble that while outwardly demure is creepily seductive, like Miss Margarida herself. She’s the adolescent boy’s nocturnal fantasy come true, perched on the edge of her desk, hand unconsciously drifting to her hip or breast.

The class, or rather audience, is about to get an education – and it won’t involve Miss M removing her clothes, sharing the facts of life or even nurturing wide ranging imaginations and questing intellects. The opposite proves true over the course of Trevor Schmidt’s production of Miss Margarida’s Way. Miss Margarida’s Grade Eight biology classroom is a totalitarian regime in miniature, a place where “evolution (and revolution) is nothing.” We’re the worms and she’s the charismatic dictator.

Roberto Athayde’s 1971 allegory (banned in his native Brazil), satirizes the horrors of totalitarianism – rebellion will get you sent to the principal’s office, from whence people have not returned – as well as other tyrannies. There’s more than a whiff of the maternal guilt trip about the monstrous Miss M as well as sex and greed.
There’s a creepy desperation to Linda Grass’s characterization as she paces the garish linoleum on-stage at the Third Space. From the moment she enters the room, sits down at her desk, and fishes the teacher’s accoutrements out of her bag (Kleenex, pens, a mug with “Teachers are Special” emblazoned upon it), there’s breathless anticipation. No matter how sweetly Grass smiles, the horrific underpainting is present. Is Miss Margarida in full possession of her marbles? The answer from the first bell is a resounding “no,” and Grass takes the class on a bizarre journey.

Glass brings a dry wit and off the cuff style to her portrayal, which infuses Trevor Schmidt’s beautifully passed production with moments of uneasy hilarity. Her illustrations of division and equation would make Darwin raise a beetling brow. Despite her slim stature, Grass is a menacing presence: confronted with the question “What is evolution?” yours truly was at a loss, more concerned with the proximity of teacher’s quivering yardstick than the answer. (It would be interesting to see what happens with a mouthy audience.)

Together, Grass and Schmidt present a polished and morbidly fascinating couple of hous in the classroom. Opening night seemed a bit constrained as Grass delivered a flawless performance that nevertheless needed a bit more chaos. As the run progresses, no doubt she’ll open up a bit more and integrate more of the character’s visceral rhythms.



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Miss Margarida gets lost in the lesson
David Berry

If you’re going to reduce something to a microcosm, it has to work on its own terms; put another way, if a metaphor doesn’t work for both of the things you’re comparing, it really doesn’t work as a metaphor at all.

Brazilian playwright Roberto Athayde certainly has half of his metaphor down in his 1970s banned-in-Brazil tale of a teacher-cum-tyrant, Miss Margarida’s Way. His portrayal of an arbitrary authority – Miss Margarida (Linda Grass) is a stand-in specifically for Brazil’s military regime of the era, but, of course, works as a façade for pretty much any figure leaning towards fascism – is eerily accurate. From the paranoid, arms-flailing suspicion to the calm, quiet expectation of order to the black-tongued assault on those who dare question authority, Athayde has the ugly respect demanded by malevolent tyrants captured to the finest stroke.
As a teacher, though, Miss Margarida hardly makes sense, Athayde’s point essentially strangles his person, and what is a sharp, cutting satire on one level falls into gross – albeit mostly outrageously hilarious – caricature when it tries to get small.

Miss Margarida is all iron fist, with even her moments of attempted humanity serving only to emphasize that she’s basically swapping general’s stars for a sweater vest. While this has a potent comic effect, Athayde’s point about the parallels of power disappears quickly when his character screeches her way out of reality – if anything, he’s effectively suggesting that dictators are born, not made, which is a problem with a very simple solution.

Grass’s performance ebbs and flows with the script, though it’s hard to see how she and director Trevor Schmidt could have played it much differently. When Grass puts her claws up, the laughter is almost as ferocious as she is: there’s a hilarious menace in the way she scrawls “MEN=HOMOS+FAGS” across the chalkboard at the back of the stage, and her attack on a teaching-aid skeleton was so emphatic that, on opening night, she was actually bloodied when she got back up to stuff the broken pieces into a desk.

Too often, though, Miss Margarida’s lashes seem to come despite the fact there’s no reason for her to pull out the whip. You can hardly expect a theatre audience to capture the true spirit of an eighth-grade biology class, obviously, but Miss Margarida’s paranoid outbreaks seem to come about mostly because of timing: her capricious viciousness is indicative only of the fact that she’s basically just FUBAR, which is painfully funny but, ahem, hard to take seriously.

This would matter less if it was straight-up comedy, but Athayde keeps reminding the audience (once literally) that this is supposed to be serious stuff.

Comic intent dwindles as the second act goes on, and Grass is left trying to make you forget she has fangs, especially hard considering it’s all Athayde has let you see of her face until that point. What could be incisive is instead only amusing, and once that’s gone, all that’s left is a fake plastic skeleton stuffed into a desk and a school bell that’s ringing at 10pm.



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Staged Tyranny dares audience to react
Satire’s success depends on reaction and dynamics of the crowd
Liz Nicholls - Edmonton Journal

You there at the back, you sniveling little non-entity, sit up straight and pay attention. “What do you take this for? A Brothel?” Welcome back to the educational system where, as your teacher, Miss Margarida, points out, you are indeed paying to get screwed.

Ah yes, finally…theatre that makes you feel young again. “Within these walls you have no choice. It is as if you didn’t exist.” Linda Grass flashes her high-beam smile briefly at the delicious cosmic absurdity. Instantly the grin turns tigerish: everyone is lunch.

With Miss Margarida’s Way, Northern Light Theatre revisits a 1971 satire by Brazilian émigré Roberto Athayde. It’s not a satire about schools, despite the amusingly grim theatricality of director Trevor Schmidt’s design, which superimposes the same paint-splattered lino, the same torturous wooden desks that infiltrate your nightmares. It uses the classroom – with us as the lumpen educational proletariat – as a surreal demo of the way tyrannical power works.
It’s a way to shed light on modern history, with its spectacularly abusive regimes. And on the greater mystery, perhaps, of obedience. Why do people comply? Why do they make tyranny possible?

As Miss Margarida’s Grade 8 biology class reveals, the politics of oppression, so useful in church and state, start in the small. A grinding daily regime of badgering and belittling, wheedling coercion and threats modulated with seductive advance, all seasoned with self-righteousness and even pathos…and gradually your rocky resolve gets corroded all smooth. The mousey student (Taylor Chadwick) who tentatively takes the regime up on its invitation to air his views, quickly gets flattened. Schools are about turning out new generations of docile accomplices without which dictators would be an endangered species.

It’s not that Miss M. hides her tracks. That’s part of the fun of the show. “The worst is always what comes after.” The great principle of biology is that “each one of you is going to die.” The historical imperative is domination; “everyone wants to be Miss Margarida.” Our English assignment is “a creative paper describing your own funeral in your own words.” There is no appeal to a higher authority. No one sent to the principal’s office has ever come back.

Like grammar itself, this pedagogy depends heavily on repetition. In a solo show of two hours duration this is a somewhat quixotic enterprise, and one that depends to some extent on surprises from the audience. Every show will be different. On Opening Night, the experiment in dynamics didn’t produce particularly interesting results: people laughed, but no one talked back, no one scrawled graffiti on the blackboard at recess – as routinely happened in New York. Maybe that in itself is revealing.

Only a late-show blackout gave Grass much chance to use her considerable improv chops. She’s a highly watchable, perpetually in motion and funny. But she’s no, in truth, genuinely scary as Miss M. The monster we meet is unraveling already. The performance emphasizes the tyrant’s neediness and vulnerability; she’s a self-conscious, sexually frustrated clown flashing fabulous gams out of desperation not as a prelude to drilling a stiletto through someone’s carotid. She’s just pretending to be invincible; she’s comely version of the wonderful wizard.

It’s a hopeful insight into authoritarian regimes, maybe. But it seems to undermine the impact of the play.


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Margarida gets a good grade
Edmon Rotea - Gateway

For a small, residentially located theatre that’s attempting something a bit more “sharp, hip and urban,” class is definitely in session with Northern LightsTheatre inaugural production of Miss Margarida’s Way.

Miss Margarida’s Way, a one-woman show starring Linda Grass as the eighth-grade biology teacher Miss Margarida, is more than just a simple play—it’s an interactive, immersive and literally an in-your-face experience.

Upon entering the doors of Northern Light Theatre’s Third Playing Space, unassuming audience members get a glimpse of the stage setting: a typical classroom with the teacher’s desk at the front and nine student desks arranged in a simple three-by-three formation.

At first, the audience will be looking for a place to sit, scouting the rows of black chairs that line the left, the center, and the right sides of the stage. But, before class starts, the more observant and daring audience members can talk to the theatre’s staff and choose to forego the general seating, instead enduring the uncomfortable confines of one of the onstage student desks.

Yours truly decided to get one of the best seats in the house, even if it made him look like keener in front of the rest of the audience. The experience made the play more real and more enjoyable than watching a movie on a high-definition television. It’s a theatrical experience that’s only rivaled by real life itself, or the futuristic holodeck of the USS Enterprise.

The bell rings, and Miss Margarida enters the classroom. With her black-rimmed pseudo-intellectual glasses, her decorated, red stiletto pumps, red vest, red handbag, black skirt and black stockings, the older—yet attractive—schoolteacher is ready to teach and seduce the audience.

“Is there a Messiah in the class? A Messiah?” questions Miss Margarida as she reads out the prank class list—a list that also includes the names “Holy Father” and “Holy Ghost.” But after quickly learning that it’s all a prank, Miss Margarida erupts in anger—and her entertaining dialogue about life, society, politics, masturbation and sex education begins.

Minutes later, during geography class, Miss Margarida even draws an erect penis on the blackboard and refers to it as the “Cape of Good Hope.” Soon after, Miss Margarida rants about the truth of life, education, the real world, the birds and the bees, and childhood lesbian encounters.

While her spouting may seem repetitive, at least Miss Margarida engages her pupils—the audience—as she confides in, seduces, and tries to teach them with yelling, swearing and vulgar language: dialogue fit for a crazy, charismatic, manic-depressive totalitarian dictator. Even if a wannabe-student raises his/her hand or makes a comment, Miss Margarida delivers convincing improvisation and comments that definitely satisfies one of her many blackboard settings: “there’s no good teacher without a good class.”

Even though Miss Margarida’s Way is a revival of playwright Roberto Athayde’s 1970’s production, the play will appeal to today’s audiences—especially those with short attention spans. Like her expression, “school is a second home,” theatre-goers looking for a unique live-theatre performance will definitely enjoy attending class at Northern Light Theatre’s A-plus performance of Miss Margarida’s Way.

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