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.

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