Miss Margarida’s way

Tragicomic monologue for an impetuous woman

By Roberto Athayde (author’s translation)
With Emilie Chevrillon
Directed by : Michel Giès
From October 17, 2023 to January 17, 2024
At the Théâtre Essaïon : 6 rue Pierre-au-Lard – Paris 4th – France
The theater website : www.essaion-theatre.com

Is power preposterous?
Yes, it is if it provides us with a sufficiently shameless striptease.
Miss Margarida achieves this by reducing the audience to schoolchildren. This “Tragicomic monologue for an impetuous woman”, performed successfully around the world by the greatest actresses such as Estelle Parsons on Broadway and Annie Girardot in France, was written to denounce the dictatorship in Brazil. More contemporary than ever, the play confronts us, using caustic comedy, with the lunacy of power.

Today more than ever, there is an urgent need to understand the mechanism Miss Margarida make us experience “for real” whilst reducing us to schoolchildren in front of their teacher.
Where can someone’s desire for power lead, even if he has only a crumb of this power at his disposal?
Miss Margarida has but her desk, her chair and her blackboard which is green! But as anyone -politicians, media, social networks, influencers- owning an ounce of power, she makes use of words: formidable weapons when their content has been skewed or even rendered meaningless in order to get control of minds. And she makes use of them until the machine becomes jammed and she herself is lost.