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).

Back to Play & Review Archives