Theater Review—

‘No Child’ Returns To Connecticut, This Time The Way It Should Be

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — The last time I saw No Child Left Behind it was performed in Hartford, using four actors to play several dozen roles. That production was excellent, but now Long Wharf Theatre is presenting Nilaja Sun’s play as it was originally conceived: with Ms Sun, the playwright, alone on a bare stage, playing all the parts herself, simply by  changing voices and body language.

The play recounts the attempt by a visiting “teaching artist” to cajole a class of underachieving losers in a crumbling Bronx high school into performing a serious play before an audience of their “friends, parents and loved ones.”

As narrated by an elderly janitor who has worked at Malcolm X High since 1960 — back when all the kids were Italian, and the school was called Robert Moses High, he was the first black member of the custodial staff — the story revolves around a particularly disruptive tenth grade class currently in the process of demoralizing their sixth English teacher of the year.

Into this picture bursts Ms Sun, hired to fill an eight week stint as visiting artist, thanks to an $8,000 cultural grant applied for by the school’s assistant principal. Wide eyed and eager, she needs this job to pay her back rent, but as a product of the Bronx herself, she really wants to work with these kids, to do something for her people.

She has chosen to have the class read, analyze and then stage Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 1988 drama Our Country’s Good. Set in the 18th Century Australian penal colony, it recounts how the first governor of the colony tried to use art to improve the lives of the convicts under his jurisdiction.

He ordered a young Marine Lieutenant to have the prisoners — male and female — put on a play. The one he chose was one that happened to be a hit on the London Stage at the time, George Farquarhar’s restoration comedy The Recruiting Officer.

So this is a play about a play about people putting on a play. It sounds like one of Escher’s optical illusions, but once you start to think about it, the thematic connection becomes clear.  Just as the convicts came from the bottom rung of the English social ladder, shipped to the other side of the world so that their country could be rid of them, so these tenth graders — caged in a school dominated by metal detectors and contemptuous security guards — have been written off by society at large. 

As in Wertenbaker’s play, the dramatic tension lies in wondering whether Ms Sun will possibly be able to pull it off and succeed.  While their rude and obnoxious behavior drives her to the point of giving up like their previous five teachers did, the students, like the convicts, eventually begin to form tentative bonds with one another. They learn a little about trust, even as Ms Sun realizes the enormity of the obstacles they face. Eight weeks of artistic enrichment will not overcome all the ravages of poverty, drugs, gang violence and abuse, but it does offer a glimmer of hope and possibility.

Ms Sun is amazing in her ability to transform herself instantly into the dozens of people who populate the school: from a roomful of black and Hispanic adolescents to an assortment of harried faculty members, from a snarling West Indian security guard to a grieving Dominican grandmother, from a cynical landlord to, of course, herself. Yes, before achieving award-winning success with this play in its Off Broadway debut,  Ms Sun spent eight years as a teaching artist in the city schools herself.

The title of the play comes from the Federal initiative that promised to equalize educational opportunities by demanding that all schools be forced to demonstrate their students’ achievement on standardized tests, or lose their accreditation. Since these tests focus on math and reading, curriculums are reshaped to meet the narrow confines of the test, at the expense of broader and more philosophical questions, artistic exploration and expression, and self-examination and insight.

Thus it is sadly ironic that the No Child policy has seen enrichment programs like this one sacrificed on the altar of multiple choice tests. As the old janitor observes,  teaching is a terribly difficult, dreadfully underpaid and unappreciated profession, and yet there will always be a few noble souls determined to fight the good fight.

(Performances continue until April 18. Call 203-787-4282 or visit LongWharf.org for details.)