From To Sir with Love to Welcome Back, Kotter to The History Boys, there is something about a classroom that is naturally dramatic. What is a teacher, after all? A lone performer trying to hold the attention of an often-wary audience, hoping that they leave the room with a lingering idea or feeling that will stay with them as they fumble through life in the outside world. But there is something special about Nilaja Sun’s play, No Child, which opened at Next Act Theatre this weekend.
Perhaps it’s the timing. Our country is battling—once again—over the government’s level of commitment to education (with Wisconsin leading the charge toward the New Frugality). And Sun’s story—based on her experience as a “teaching artist” at a Bronx high school—highlights both the challenges and the potential triumphs of the nation’s endless struggle to offer valuable and meaningful education.
Perhaps it’s the universal appeal of school-room dramas—the chance to watch young people stride toward adulthood with both brash confidence and humbling blunders. In Sun’s play, the idealistic teacher wants her class to perform the historically complex and nuanced Our Country’s Good, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play about the attempt to stage a play in the penal colony of 1789 Australia, using convicts as actors. Seeing the script for the first time, one of the students yells out, “Yo, Justin Timberlake done wrote himself a play!”
But there is no “perhaps” about the appeal of Marti Gobel, and the dramatic smarts of director Mary MacDonald Kerr (who has her own experience with the single-actor play). Gobel gives a marvelous performance, playing all of No Child’s sixteen characters–from teachers to principals to the dozen or so African-American or Puerto Rican students in her class. A good actor could approach a task with technical smarts—how to give each character a distinctive tic or vocal inflection so the conversations are clear and legible. (She tackled a similar play in 2012, in Renaissance Theatreworks’ production of Neat.) But Gobel finds incredible warmth and humanity in her characters as well. You’ll leave No Child both charmed and inspired by the lively cross-section of humanity embodied in a single actor.
Gobel is so good, in fact, that she can help you overlook some of the play’s well-worn tropes and clichés. The aging school janitor that narrates the play is a cliché already well-lampooned by satirists like Key and Peele. And there aren’t too many surprises in Sun’s story—even though it was drawn from her years of experience as a NYC school system Teaching Artist. But the oft-told stories are often the most compelling, particularly when there is real heart and true talent behind the telling.
