LOS
ANGELES TIMES
August
6, 2004
THEATER
BEAT
A
stinging slap in the face of glib bromides about the salutary power of
education, Robert Athayde's 1977 "Miss Margarida's Way" serves up
plenty of dark sarcasm in the classroom, if not very persuasive thought
control. Subtitled with withering quaintness "A Tragicomic Monologue for
an Impetuous Woman," the play is a real-time nervous breakdown as well as
a strident meditation on the hopelessly blurred line between authority and
hypocrisy.
It
is also, and perhaps above all, a grinding workout for a thoroughbred
performer, and in Bonita Friedericy, director Bruce Wieland's sparkling new
production has one of L.A.'s most mercurial, mordantly charming and out-and-out
brilliant actors. Strutting and sidling with eerie precision around a set (by
Susan Gratch) dominated by chalkboard green and the regulation wood-grain of
schoolroom desks, Friedericy makes this bitter, scabrous, simpering monster of
an eighth-grade teacher into an icon both hauntingly universal and unsettlingly
immediate.
In
chunky black shoes and lean, smart skirt ensemble (uncredited costumes), her
wig a taut pile that's part laurel wreath, part sparrow's nest, the
trash-talking Miss Margarida--pronounced "MAG-a-ree-da"--embodies the
nightmare of discredited yet still empowered leadership. She transparently
contradicts herself, flies wildly off the handle and mixes a toxic cocktail of
hilariously blunt discouragement, digression and condescension.
A
silent, shaggy student (Flannery Lunsford) sits to one side as the main target
for Miss M's abuse, though Friedericy includes us all as stunned pupils caught
in the headlight glare of her smilingly oppressive gaze.
A
drunken second act wobbles but rights itself with an urgently suggestive
climax, under Trevor Norton's exquisite lights, in which Miss M stumbles onto
the meaning of life--or rather, given the play's epistemological
preoccupations, the meaning of meaning.
For
a solo show as provoking as it is virtuosic, "Miss Margarida's Way"
is a primrose path indeed.
-- Rob Kendt
"Miss Margarida's Way," presented by Stage Door
Johnny Productions at the Zephyr Theatre, 7456 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles. 8
p.m. today and Aug. 14, 19, 20, 21; 7 p.m. Aug. 15 and 22. Ends Aug. 22. $15.
(323) 860-9860. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.