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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