Ms. Himmler

By T.E.K.

MISS MARGARIDA'S WAY by Roberto Athayde When the letter E is reached on the hurricane list, the storm should be named Estelle. As the teacher of the play's title, Estelle Parsons portrays a woman of blistered paranoia and feverish sexual frustration who qualifies as a blackboard Himmler to an eighth-grade biology class.

She blows the roof off Broadway's Ambassador Theater in a drama that merits little more than a stray snore.

In a monologue lasting the better part of two hours, she rants, raves, bullies, teases, threatens, roars and talks scatologically, concupiscently and incessantly. She also primps, daubs on garish makeup, strips off her blouse and carts loads of books to her desk only to hurl them irascibly about the room. What does all the sound and fury signify? Virtually nothing, except to prove that Parsons has the stamina of a deckhand and an awesome range of acting skills visibly being laid waste.

It is Brazilian Playwright Roberto Athayde's feeble premise that the theater goers are the students, and they are encouraged to answer back only to be squelched by Miss Margarida, a form of bearbaiting, not dialogue. If the play means to be a parable of political tyranny, the point is fully made in the first ten minutes. More probably, Playwright Athayde means to say that we are force-fed prefabricated information throughout our lives. He also goes cosmic over morality with the appearance of a skeleton .nd Miss Margarida's big bad news: "You are all going to die." Without Estelle Parsons, the play surely would have. --T.E.K.

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