María Merlino explores a sensitive
character’s contradictions

María Merlino in ¿Cómo vuelvo? Leyenda campestre de una maestra errante.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

María Merlino stars in ¿Cómo vuelvo?, exploring a sensitive character’s contradictions

In Argentina, the word maestra (schoolteacher), from a diachronic approach, has widely differing class connotations.

In Manuel Puig’s Boquitas pintadas, set in a mid 20th century small town in Buenos Aires Province, maestra was endowed with social prestige and good marriage prospects to a wealthy professional and a promising future as housewife and mother.

In later decades, though still bearing traces of former social achievement and standing, maestra, perhaps partly due to a schoolteacher’s meager wages, lost much of its appeal as a vocation, a profession and a social mobility tool.

In the new stage production ¿Cómo vuelvo? Leyenda campestre de una maestra errante, celebrated fringe actress-singer María Merlino and filmmaker-theatre director Diego Lerman, after enjoying runaway success with Nada del amor me produce envidia and Qué me ha hecho, vida mía, explore recent history in a praiseworthy effort to explain Argentina’s present and to provide a glimpse into its near future, or simply an approximation to it.

“This is as good as it gets,” the señoritas maestras realistically had to tell themselves, confined as they were to the role of maestras de grado — teaching everything from language to maths, from geography to history.

Truth is, the maestras de grado, as anyone schooled in the state-run education system in Argentina, were key to providing literacy and a comprehensive preparation for higher studies. Often caring not only for the students’ learning needs but also for their integral formation as individuals, the maestras, as part of the country’s evolving social fabric, embodied everything synonymous with edifying, stoical permanence.

Breathing chalk dust, literally, the maestras of Argentina spent hours on end marking students’ works and seeing dozens of cohorts march off toward a brilliant future gilded with promises or, on the contrary, a string of broken dreams and unfulfilled hopes.

The maestras’ plight continues, almost unchanged, to this day, with thousands of escuelas normales (schoolteachers’ training schools) churning out graduates willing to burn out their brains, their entire lives, for the sake of... social improvement? Based on four short stories by Argentine writer Hebe Uhart, ¿Cómo vuelvo?, in spite of its limited scope, is full of epic grandeur, so imposing is the title character’s design to find out — and, if possible, implement — the real duties of her profession, which she has not quite come to terms with yet.

The teaching profession, we see in Merlino and Lerman’s production, was often a matter of destiny rather than volition. Indeed, the maestra in ¿Cómo vuelvo?, thrown into an escuela normal to get her diploma and a job, starts out, if not as an automaton, as something of a mechanical contraption standing in front of students unwilling to learn, fighting to get into their brains what syllabuses dictated on them as survival knowledge.

But this maestra errante, who gets posting around numerous schools (rural schools, we gather) at some point stops to ponder what her real vocation is. Her impassioned self-questioning comes across as an excruciatingly painful examination of the real purpose of her task.

Actress Merlino, the talk of the town when it comes to the fringe theatre circuit in Buenos Aires, is remarkably good in her own adaptation of Uhart’s stories, which she herself segued around the theme of individual identity to draw a bigger picture: a whole people’s quest for the meaning of existence.

Moving around alone on the enormous stage at Santos 4040 playhouse, Merlino feels as much as ease as though she were performing on the much smaller stage of La Carpintería theatre, where Nada del amor me produce envidia played for several consecutive seasons to packed houses.

While in Nada del amor... Merlino impersonated a woman of modest means and modest aspirations, in ¿Cómo vuelvo?, however unassuming the maestra she plays, the stakes are higher. The teacher in question, indeed, stands for everything anyone is entitled to question, from voluntary choice of profession to the make-or-break decision of humming her dissent with the establishment, with everything everyone seems to take for granted.

Alternately invigorated and weakened by her unending self-questioning, Merlino’s teacher brings to the fore, in natural prose or in sung lines, the inner process of revelation, silent acceptance or open refusal to go along with social and political dictums, so powerful is her (the teacher’s) determination to do as her conscience tells her to after painstaking soul-searching.

Merlino’s monologue, aided by cinematic props like rural scenes projections, courtesy of the talented filmmaker-director Lerman, is as pungent as anything she’s done before on stage, and ¿Cómo vuelvo? is a veritable tour de force, one of the season’s highlights, with no self-questioning or hesitation on the part of viewers as to this show’s remarkable quality.

when & where

¿Cómo vuelvo? Leyenda campestre de una maestra errante. Based on texts by Hebe Uhart, adapted by María Merlino. Produced by: Flor de un día. With: María Merlino. Music by: Carmen Baliero. Sets designed by: Diego Lerman. Costumes by: Valentina Bari. Lighting design: Iván Gierasinchuk and Miranda de Souza. Directed by: Diego Lerman. At Santos 4040, Santos Dumont 4040, Chacarita. Saturdays at 8pm and 10pm. Tickets $150 ($90 for seniors and students). Reservations: www.alternativateatral.com.ar.

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/196517/torn-between-vocation-and-frustrating-reality