‘No Child’ Lacks Development

Since its enactment in 2001, President Bush’s widely-criticized “No Child Left Behind” act has drawn attacks from every possible front: From the left for being too vague in defining “national standards,” from the right for being an “unfunded mandate,” and now, from Cambridge’s premier repertory theater for being all-around not good enough. Playwright and actress Nilaja Sun’s solo performance makes “No Child”—directed by Hal Brooks, set-designed by J. Michael Griggs, and running at the American Repertory Theatre through Dec. 23—very enjoyable to watch, although its critique of public education reform lacked focus.

Sun compiled the storyline and characters of “No Child” from almost ten years of experience working as a “teaching artist” in schools across New York City. The play follows Sun as she teaches a 10th grade class at the Bronx’s Malcolm X High School to read, analyze, and ultimately perform Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 1988 play “Our Country’s Good” over the course of a six-week theater workshop. Wertenbaker’s play tells the story of a group of convicts who, themselves, must band together to put on a play—so that “No Child” is, as the school janitor observes amusedly in the play’s opening scene, a story of “a play within a play within a play.”

A semi-autobiographical, self-reflexive tone weaves itself throughout the play. But Sun’s solo play is, above all, a tremendous and exhausting feat of acting. She throws herself into a bevvy of characters: The high-strung principal Mrs. Kennedy, concerned only with the school’s statewide Regents scores and the federal grants that depend on them; the abrasive security guard, who sends students home if they dare sport so much as a metal belt buckle; Sun’s landlord, who believes that sending all students to Catholic school would solve the problems of the American educational system; and Sun herself, the dedicated teacher who, after attending Catholic school for twelve years, “didn’t know [she] was black until college.” And those are just some of the more memorable ones.

Sun’s characters allow the audience to watch the story unfold from a number of different angles, resulting in an incredibly rich narrative. But what makes this approach most effective is the completeness with which Sun depicts each of these personalities.

The diction, the accents, the body language, the facial expressions, even the way the characters walk—it all reflects every detail of some stereotype or another, some character who is a caricature of him- or herself. At the drop of a hat Sun is a slouchy, mouthing-off teenager named Jerome, and one second later she is meek, investment-banker-turned-educator Ms. Tam, trying vainly to convince Jerome to come to a 41-minute class less than 20 minutes late.

Sun is a magician whose bag of tricks—one hilarious, overdone character after another—holds the audience captive for an impressive 65 minutes through sheer entertainment value alone. But as the title suggests, the play is intended to be more than a one-woman stand-up routine. “No Child” fancies itself an account of both the failings of public education and the efforts to reform it through the No Child Left Behind act.

While the play offers a few chew-on-this insights, they usually come in the form of snappy one-liners (“I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout no ‘No Child,’ no ‘who child,’ no ‘yes child’…I know there’s a hole in the ceiling; now who’s accountable for that?”) that end up making you nod your head in passive agreement, rather than urge you to think critically about the state of public education in America.

Therein lies the weakness of the play: It demands very little from its audience. Sun criticizes teachers like Ms. Tam for entering the teaching profession with a mindset of self-sacrifice and a conviction that they can single-handedly make a difference in students’ lives. It’s a vision that is grossly ignorant of the reality of a world in which gangs murder students’ siblings and grandparents stand in for absent mothers and long-gone fathers.

Yet Sun not only portrays herself as one of these teachers, she also feeds her audience all the “aww” moments they need to convince them that perhaps they, too, could be life-changing, difference-making public school educators. At the end of the students’ production, one of Sun’s students tells her that her life has taken an unexpected turn, but that Sun’s course has taught her that life could hold more for her than the harsh world of the Bronx. Sun presents the scene as a moment of enlightenment, but the girl’s comments seem trite and unrealistic.

In the end, “No Child” is primarily an entertaining commentary on contemporary schools. Although engaging, it falls just short of a compelling critique of federal education legislation.

—Crimson reviewer Anjali Motgi can be reached at amotgi@fas.harvard.edu.