REVIEWS ...
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Actress makes 16 roles work
By Christine Dolan
In an era of slashed funding, test-driven education and sometimes-deadly school violence, it is easy to forget the real magic that happens in a classroom when teachers and students truly connect.
Nilaja Sun's No Child, an intensely challenging solo show set in a rough Bronx high school classroom, offers an inspiring reminder of education's transformative possibilities.
Sun's 2005 play has just opened at GableStage with Carbonell Award winner Lela Elam tackling the 16 roles -- teachers, students, a principal, a security guard, an elderly custodian, a grandmother -- played by Sun in a number of earlier productions.
It's one thing for an actor-playwright to perform a multicharacter piece crafted from her own experiences and tailored to her talents, as Sun did with No Child or April Yvette Thompson did with Liberty City. It's quite another for a different performer to step into those many pairs of shoes, becoming a test both for the new actor and for the strength of the play itself. At GableStage, both the inspired Elam and No Child earn a solid A.
Rooted in Sun's experience as a teaching artist in New York's public schools, No Child follows Ms. Sun into a rowdy 10th grade classroom at Malcolm X High School in the Bronx. She has been hired to put on a play with the kids in nervous new teacher Cindy Tam's English class. Her choice? Timberlake Wertenbaker's 1788 drama Our Country's Good, about a group of Australian convicts putting on a play.
The students' near-unanimous reaction, as expressed by a swaggering kid named Jerome, is something on the order of "aw hell no."
Working on Tim Connelly's empty-but-evocative set, which suggests a decaying high school with green-specked linoleum floors and decades of dirt on its walls, Elam uses different voices, accents, postures and signature moves to define each character.
With director Joseph Adler's clarifying guidance helping her make (and keep) each character distinct, Elam changes on a dime from the enthusiastic Ms. Sun to blinged-out Shondrika to Star Wars fan Chris to a kid named Phillip, whose Our Country's Good line readings change before our very eyes thanks to Ms. Sun's canny direction.
Elam is equally compelling as the no-nonsense, get-it-done principal Mrs. Kennedy; a humorless Jamaican security guard, who does battle with Shondrika's bling; and the wise Janitor Baron, the No Child narrator who has seen teachers, kids and educational trends come and go in his half century at the school.
Perhaps the most awe-inspiring moments in No Child, at least for anyone who couldn't begin to do what Elam does, are the scenes in which Ms. Sun is working with the class. Technically speaking, she is alone onstage. But she's so good at suggesting the chaotic mix of voices in a classroom, so good at conveying those sparking moments of connection that when she lets some of the characters share her final bows, it feels just right.
Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.
