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Berkeley Rep's 'No Child ' enticing solo show
By Pat Craig Contra Costa Times
May 13, 2008
With "No Child "...," Nilaja Sun has harvested a familiar field — the bright, innovative and fearless teacher inspiring and winning over a classroom of students everyone else has written off.
And the play that opened Monday at Berkeley Rep has plenty of "aw" and "gee-whiz" moments. You know, the ones where we discover, indeed, these worst-of-the-worst high schoolers have hearts, minds and feelings, if someone is only willing to seek them out.
While there is no doubt the piece is a paean to teachers, particularly those in difficult circumstances, as in Malcolm X High School in the Bronx, where Sun found herself working as a teacher/artist, it is also a remarkable and delightfully entertaining show that makes its statement without once moving into sermon territory.
It is "To Sir, With Love" without the British Museum and Sidney Poitier, or "Stand and Deliver" without the Advance Placement calculus. But more remarkably, it is a 16-character show with only one actor on the stage and playing all the parts.
Essentially, it is a semiautobiographical turn by Sun, about bringing theater to youngsters in New York's inner-city schools. In the play, she comes into the classroom of Ms. Tam, who left a lucrative job in finance to teach, probably because she saw a sign on a bus offering exciting lifetime careers in the New York City School system.
That is the opinion of Baron, the custodian who has been at the school since 1958, and has seen it all, including the overwhelmed, ineffective Ms. Tam, who is astounded when her students pay attention to the new drama teacher.
Sun plans to cast students in "Our Country's Good," the 1988 Timberlake Wertenbaker play about convicts in an Australian penal colony staging a Restoration comedy.
It's sort of a play within a play that could reflect on what students at Malcolm X are experiencing right now, Sun explains. The students are amazed she isn't staging "Raisin in the Sun" or "West Side Story." "No Child "..." is filled with nice little zigzag moments like that. They work well alongside the structure, with the different characters making entrances and exits often in midsentence, and spilling across the stage in a wild, near-acrobatic manner.
And that is what differentiates Sun from the monologists she might most reasonably compare to — actors such as Danny Hoch and Sarah Jones, both of whom fill their shows with characters. But where Jones and Hoch tend to develop lengthy and often complex characterizations, Sun's characters are on and off almost before you realize it. They are more punctuation marks or parenthetical phrases — characters who do exactly what Sun intended them to do, but with a minimum of words.
To make this work, she relies on an impressive physicality, both in the way she moves her body and in an evocative array of facial expressions.
It is a short show, just over an hour, but a memorable one.
THEATER REVIEW WHAT: "No Child " WHERE: Berkeley Repertory Theatre Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley WHEN: 7 p.m. Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays through June 1 RUNNING TIME: 1 hour, 10 minutes TICKETS: $33-$69, 510-647-2949 or www.berkeleyrep.org
Copyright 2008
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