This is a play in which an insane teacher lectures to her eighth grade students — the audience seated in rows with desks — for two acts. Miss Margarida does everything a teacher should never do. She’s volatile, violent, seductive, intimidating, sexually exhibitionist, domineering, vulgar, rigid, irrational and inconsistent and you can’t follow a thing she says. Her “lecture” meanders in a kind of free-for-all of psychic drives with, when the stage lights dim, psychic memories that don’t add insight; there’s nothing there “to learn” and a threatening sexual current runs through it. It’s not a “tragic comedy for an impetuous woman” as Bay Street describes in their flier and which drew me to see it — impetuous my foot, she’s loony.
