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A CurtainUp Review
Miss Margarida's Way
By Larry Switzky
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Do you know what is the great principle of history? Everyone wants to dominate
everyone else. Exactly like Miss Margarida dominates you. In this classroom
you have no choice: You do what Miss Margarida tells you to do and only what
Miss Margarida tells you. And you pay for that!.—-Miss Margarida,
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Kelly Rauch as Miss Margarida's Way
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Actually, with her red fright wig and librarian glasses, Rauch's Miss Margarida is less a willing executioner than an acrobatic comic dynamo, a woman literally on the verge of a nervous breakdown. By playing against the history and tenor of the text, director Darren Evans offers lessons in how to laugh at terror's absurdities in a dictatorship shrunk into a classroom and presided over by a foul-mouthed pantomime villain. Athayde's 1971 play, sub-titled a Tragicomic Monologue for an Impetuous Woman, was censored in his native Brazil and has often been viewed as a free-floating allegory for the abuses (and fragility) of despotic power. In two classes, interrupted by a recess, Miss Margarida tries to teach the basics of biology to her eighth-grade class ("the facts of life" will have to wait until the twelfth grade). What she really demonstrates are her methods of indoctrination: slogans and threats, the illusion of free speech and the reality of violent oppression.
Estelle Parsons made this brutally difficult two-tiered monologue famous through two runs of performances on Broadway, once in 1977 and again in a revival in 1990 and accounts of her cruelty are legendary: students being marched to the blackboard to proclaim their insubordination, or made an example of, without provocation, for their gender or race.
Rauch's Miss Margarida is a sillier despot, more of a Halloween mask of a tyrant than the real thing. I found myself sitting up straight when she walked up and down the rows to check our posture, though without much sense that I could face public humiliation if I didn't. On the night I attended she picked on a man of color during a marvelous set piece on the hypocrisy of a nation that pretends to be color-blind even as it exploits racial difference: "In this ountry red and white are equal. As soon as they come together they melt." She alsoharassed a few audience members about smoking marijuana and coped with the authentic pedagogical disasters of a malfunctioning overhead projector and the tendency of chalk to shatter while writing.
Rauch, plays the barely veiled repressed sexuality of Miss Margarida who is scarred by her libidinal past and her rejection by men with brazen abandon. Taking her cue from the text, she bumps and grinds her way hysterically through the classroom. On opening night she still lacked the comfort with the material meeded tp allow for the more outrageous improvisations that the play demands, particularly in the longish second half.
How has the play aged? It's still well worth seeing, though not necessarily as a parable about totalitarianism. I think we have become much savvier about the contradictions and pathologies of power since 1971. Miss Margarida's Way is now much more about the classroom as an incubator for conformity, an assembly line dressed up with animal photographs and alphabet flashcards. I'd forgotten about the vulnerability, the physical constraints of those old table arm desks, the total surrender to the personality of an instructor who may not be qualified or even sane. As it sheds its older allegorical resonances, the play could enjoy an afterlife as a critique of American education, which produces passivity through discipline that stifles personal expression
Evans and Rauch have softened the edges of a notorious piece of political theater, encouraging rebellion against a paper tiger where the original play offers an account of a nearly inescapable cycle of victimization. Watch Michael Avellar, who plays the silent role of a student, when he performs a concluding gesture that feels like a riposte to Athayde's more fatalistic vision.
This Miss Margarida's Way invites you to experiment with rebellion. It plays politics for laughs, and the laughs are plentiful. Bring your spitballs.
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Miss Margarida's Way Written and translated by Roberto Athayde Directed by Darren Evans Cast: Kelly Rauch (Miss Margarida), Michael Avellar (Student) Set Designer: Darren Evans Lighting Designer: Eric Jacobsen Stage Manager: Tiffany Allen Running time: 2 hours with one intermission Theater on Fire at Charlestown Working Theater 442 Bunker Hill St Charlestown, MA (617) 242-3285 From 5/8/09; closing 5/23/09 Thurs - Sat at 8pm Tickets: Thurs $15, Fri and Sat $20, Seniors $10, students free (with ID) Reviewed by Larry Switzky, 4/8/09 |
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Wicked
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Playbill 2007-08 Yearbook
Leonard Maltin's 2008 Movie Guide