I first published this review on BroadwayWorld.com on March 13, 2008 following a performance of ‘No Child…’ at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles, CA. This production is now running at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York City.
Oh that waskly wabbit George W. Bush, doing a complete about face with his 2009 budget request to cut $16.3 million for the National Endowment for the Arts. President Bush might actively be pursuing the degradation of federal funding for the arts, but inadvertently the lame duck has consistently delivered in providing plenty of fodder for the very art form he is trying to kill.
Combined with the eighth consecutive year of decreasing funding for the Department of Education’s Arts in Education programs, playwright and actress Nilaja Sun has found the perfect moment to make a vibrant case for arts in schools, and for theatre in general. Hopefully, those disgusted with the current administrations tactics, on all fronts, are willing to listen.
In No Child…, Sun’s highly entertaining and message driven one-woman play, now running at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, the life altering affect theatre can have on children is thrown center stage.
A whirlwind of energy, Sun is bustling with her handful of unforgettable characters, all portrayed by the skilled performer without any costume changes or nary a beat between transformations. No Child… simplistically directed by Hal Brooks, tells the story of a teaching artist – someone tasked with incorporating the arts into a classroom – battling for the attention, not only of the mostly unresponsive and abrasive Malcolm X High School – a fictitious Bronx location – but also from the system at large, prone to dismissing many a troubled public school system.
As Sun points out at one point in No Child… within New York City, it is only a short train ride between the obscenely wealthy and the abject poor. While America’s upper crust worries about getting into a hot spot co-op, just across town the urban salt of the earth is struggling for their lives. This growing disparity is also seen when looking in on the country’s public schools, stuck with the ill-fated No Child Left Behind Act to contend with.
“Hush, you could learn something.” So says a salty old janitor, as played by Sun, who is witness to the transformation at Malcolm X High and acts as both narrator and historian throughout the evening. Over the course of a semester, one class is tasked with putting on a play, giving each student a chance participate in something greater than memorizing useless trivia in order to pass defunct standardized tests.
Sun’s teaching artist finds her students lacking any type of dreams for a better future, as they are left abandoned by a school system unwilling to deal with troubled teens. The story is nothing new, as movies like “Stand and Deliver” and “Dangerous Minds” have focused on just such a subject, but the lesson is never taught enough, as the current state of affairs in America can attest.
Through art, Sun is able to engage even the toughest students, although her own financial struggles while battling to do so cause a moment of pause for the teacher, unsure if she can continue fighting a system so unwilling to change. It is unforgivable that someone like Sun, who in real life is in fact a teaching artist, willing to give up a “respectable” position in society to struggle day in and out so as to change the course of America’s youth, is left to fight off bill collectors and the IRS.
The U.S. Department of Education reports that in 2001, out of the 3.2 million teachers in this country’s public schools, nearly 30 percent of them quit within three years, with 48 percent claiming poor salaries and benefits as the top reasons. Sun’s reaction to this state of affairs, in creating No Child…, is all too relevant, whether in New York or California.
No Child… is a cry for social change, one that should be heard by all those that demand a brighter future in America. In its gritty depiction of Malcolm X High, accented by a perfectly bleak set, from both Sibyl Wickersheimer’s local design and Narelle Sisson’s original Off-Broaway design, what could have easily been a bully pulpit production is transformed into serious critique of society.
Photos by Craig Schwartz. Pictured is writer/performer Nilaja Sun.