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| Nilaja Sun in "No Child..." |
Two times I week, I update the American Theatre Facebook page with a production photo from a different TCG member theater. Today I happened to upload this photo, from a Gloucester Stage production of No Child..., and it took me back to the time, nearly 20 years ago, when I first saw Nilaja Sun perform her brilliant solo show about teaching theater to kids in the Bronx. I had the pleasure of reviewing it for Newsday, and the following year, I spent a memorable brunch with Sun for a feature in the Center Theatre Group program, in advance of its run at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City. It was a joy to revisit these pieces (I'd forgotten, for instance, that she initially wrote the show on a NYSCA grant). I've posted both my review and the feature below.
Even in city shadows, Sun shines
BY ROB KENDT
Newsday, July 17, 2006
School may be out for the summer, but you won't want to ditch the class offered by the ebullient writer-performer Nilaja Sun. Her one-woman play “No Child…,” which just reopened at the Barrow Street Theatre in the West Village after an acclaimed midtown run, burnishes some well-trod genres—the high school inspirational fable and the Mickey Rooney-and-Judy Garland backstager—to such giddily engaging heights that they seem newly minted. If you’re seeking a follow-up to Sarah Jones’ brilliant “Bridge & Tunnel,” this is it.
Here’s another multicharacter solo show that shines a warm, welcome light on the city's margins—in this case, not immigrants but the minority students at the fictional Malcolm X High in the Bronx. It’s here that the optimistic Sun, a struggling actress, comes for a six-week stint as a “teaching artist” to direct a theatrical production with an unruly 10th-grade class of misfits.
Of course, they’ll have something to teach her, too: about their good humor and resilience despite crushing poverty, parental neglect, gang violence, and, most damning, the self-fulfilling curse of low expectations.
The title’s ellipses allude to more than just the cruel irony of the Bush administration’s educational slogan, which is daily proven wrong (many children are indeed “left behind”); Sun sees the problem more widely, as the systematic abandonment of several generations of America’s permanent underclass. As the show’s kindly narrator, an aged janitor, points out, new federal standards of “accountability” aren’t going to fix that hole in the ceiling. “Now, who’s accountable for that?” he wonders.
Not to worry: “No Child…” is no sermon. Sun’s young charges, amped up on Red Bull and blissfully unaccustomed to raising their hand before speaking, try her patience mightily, and entertainingly. When she informs her class—in the sharp, bright tones of a pedagogue who neither panders nor condescends—that they’ll be performing “Our Country's Good,” Timberlake Wertenbaker's contemporary classic, the class’s alpha male, Jerome, doesn’t miss a beat: “Yo, Justin Timberlake done wrote himself a play.”
Under Hal Brooks’ expert direction, the aptly named Sun doesn’t just shine, she blazes. She delineates her cast in dizzying real-time interactions. The quick-cut sampler of the final performance is a bravura crowd-pleaser. Indeed, the show is so well built that it seems only to slow down and sink in when Sun is physically out of breath; the effect is of a sprinter stopping short to realize this race is going to be a long haul.
“They need a miracle, like, every day,” she says of the school’s underserved constituents at one point, overwhelmed at the burden. She shouldn’t sell herself, or the students, short. “No Child... ” does not make the case that theater, let alone school, can repair a frayed social fabric by itself. But, in its idealized and inspiring way, it gives us hope that those everyday miracles do make a difference.
Sun Delivers “No Child…”
Center Theatre Group program, March 2008
What’s in a title? In the case of Nilaja Sun’s acclaimed solo show No Child…, it’s what’s not in the title that seems to speak volumes.
“I created the title that way to ask that you open your mind,” says Sun, whose self-penned work ran to packed houses for 11 months Off-Broadway before touring to Chicago, Washington, D.C., Berkeley, and, next March, Los Angeles’ Kirk Douglas Theatre. “Because a lot of people think, ‘Oh, it’s about No Child Left Behind.’ I understand that, but there’s so much more to our kids and to their situation than just this law, though that is a huge part of it.”
Based on Sun’s own experiences as a teaching artist in some of New York’s toughest schools, No Child… traces her efforts to stage an in-class production of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good with a class of high-energy, low-attention-span youths at a crumbling, underfunded Bronx high school. Though the pressure to perform on standardized tests at the expense of all other educational aims—one of the pernicious side effects of the “accountability” mandated by No Child Left Behind, national law since 2002—is among the challenges Sun’s character faces in No Child…, it is not the biggest or the worst. Poverty, violence, abuse and the often over-stimulated drama of adolescence play large roles, as do administrative burnout, turnover and indifference.
“As a teaching artist, you wouldn’t even necessarily notice No Child Left Behind unless a teacher told you or you read about it—you wouldn’t have direct contact with it,” says Sun, an actor and writer who initially took to educational theater as a day job but has proven a natural at it. “But then you would realize that around April and May, we’re not coming in as much because they’ve got to take their tests.”
For Sun, this test pressure has meant that the welcome she receives in classrooms “depends on the principal, on the administrator who feels, ‘Is this really going to be helpful at this moment? Or is doing Antigone or Aeschylus going to get in the way of their passing the test and of us keeping our funding?’ ”
But as Sun began to write the piece on a commission from the New York State Council on the Arts, she began to realize that not only are the problems of public education larger than any single piece of legislation—the solution may be broader, too.
“When I started writing the play I thought, ‘Well, of course, No Child—it’s what’s going on in education.’ And then I thought to myself, How many people really know what life is like for an inner-city teenage kid? If people don’t even know or like teenagers, why would they even care to know about how this law is affecting them?”
Her solution was to ground the story in emotional truths as much, or more, than socioeconomic realities—to show audiences real kids struggling, and to attach faces and bodies to the statistics, all the better to inspire hope that those numbers might move.
“I thought, You know what? I’m going to keep it in my heart, and capture their heart, and see how that might change ideas. Plus, I’m not too much of a heady person—not too much of an intellectual—and I personally would rather see something that affects me in an emotional way.
“So I went at it from that place, and I’m glad I did. I don’t think I would have lasted if I went from a pedantic place, where I’m talking about the woes and the ills of education. Because what you can do from there? You just sigh when you leave the theatre.”
Far from sighing, audiences have seemed elated when they leave the theatre—often after a lively talkback with the writer/performer.
“Sometimes kids will come up to me with tears in their eyes and just be thankful for telling the story. And there was a time when a teacher who had just retired after 40 years told me, ‘You summed up my entire 40-year career in just one hour.’ ”
Critics were hardly less ecstatic. The New York Observer’s John Heilpern raved that Sun’s “dazzling comic gift of transforming instantly into the essence of someone else is uncanny and effortless,” and that she “raises the tattered banner of faith in the redemptive power of theater itself, even in the wasteland.” Variety’s Marilyn Stasio called the piece “theatrically riveting,” while New York’s Jeremy McCarter wrote that “Sun’s graceful method…conveys a vivid anger about the way these kids are treated without turning the play into a screed.”
The success of No Child… has surprised no one so much as Sun herself. “I expected to do this for three weeks,” Sun says, and adds jokingly, “Now I’m going to be like Hal Holbrook, doing Mark Twain for years.”
A member of the Epic Theatre Center, through which the play was commissioned, Sun doesn’t consider herself a solo performer in the vein of Spalding Gray or John Leguizamo, though she cites them as inspirations, along with Whoopi Goldberg and Lily Tomlin.
“I do act with other people,” Sun says. “Every now and then a story will come to mind—usually because I’ve been commissioned to do a solo piece. It’s never because I just say, ‘I wanna do a solo piece,’ because they’re very hard to do.”
She compares what she does to the role of a West African griot, or wandering bard. And as much as she worked to make No Child… an engaging piece of theatre, she’s not shy about calling it “a teaching tool, especially for those who’ve never walked into a school. I keep the spirit and the skill of teaching in the show.”
One clue to Sun’s unique approach to her work is a discarded childhood ambition.
“I wanted to be a midwife, but I couldn’t pass chemistry to save my life,” Sun recalls. “Then I thought, if I don’t become a midwife, what’s the second-best thing I can do? Acting. And I thought, OK, I’m going to major in theatre. And then as I really opened my heart to the idea of it, I was like, ‘Ah, yes.’ ”
Sun may lack the science to help actual babies be born and usher mothers through labor. (Could this be one way to read the gnomic title No Child…?) But in nurturing young imaginations against great odds and outsized distractions, Sun employs rigorous care and attention, and a resilient, good-humored empathy, that seem as close to midwifing as a performing artist can get.
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