ARTicles vol. 6 i.2a: Child’s Play

Gideon Lester: How did you come to write No Child …?

Nilaja Sun: I was commissioned by the New York State Council of the Arts and Epic Theatre Ensemble to write a show about education. I’d been a teaching artist in the New York public school system for nine years, so it was a subject I knew well. I’d written and performed four solo shows in the past, but at first I thought No Child … would be a play for two or three actors. It was only after I’d written it that I realized I might be able to pull it off as a one-person show. There are many more characters in it than I’ve ever performed before, and I’ve never changed characters at the rapid speed that you see in No Child ….

GL: Why did you decide to perform it alone?

NS: Teachers often tell me that they feel as if they’re doing a one-person show in front of their classrooms every day. They’re run ragged. I wanted to recreate that feeling in the show – I don’t drink water, I barely sit down, I just keep going.

GL: When I watch the show I’m also reminded that role-play is integral to life as a student or teacher; teachers have to perform for their students, and students have to assume identities to conform socially.

NS: I’m always aware of that when I begin a residency, but hopefully the masks begin to peel off the longer you interact with the kids. All of them have some kind of identity that they’re hiding behind, but when you get underneath, you see how beautiful and vulnerable these kids and teachers are

GL: You trained as an actor and writer. How did you become a teaching artist?

NS: In 1998 I was working with the National Shakespeare Company, performing Romeo and Julietfor high school students. After the show we would pair off in the classrooms and teach Shakespeare’s language for an hour. It was then that I started to notice what life was like in a public school. I went to a Catholic school for thirteen years, and that was very different.

GL: How was it different?

NS: Discipline was really lacking in the public schools. Some of the kids couldn’t sit still for fifteen minutes. One day they were going to be the adults of America, and I was concerned for their future and for our communities. I wanted to get them out of some of the patterns that are harming them – constantly talking in class, lack of attention, negative remarks to their teachers or about themselves. That environment creates a whirlpool of darkness. That’s the reason I started teaching.

GL: How does theatre help them?

NS: It allows the students to place themselves in another person’s shoes, in another person’s life, and they become a little more empathetic. They start to understand what it means for one person, one teacher, to have to control thirty students. We don’t teach empathy much in our society – we focus on ourselves. We value an independence of spirit, which is great until you have to work in a group. The theatre also allows them to still be kids, to have fun. A lot of the time, especially in the inner city, their childhood is taken away so early. They become this weird person who looks like an adult and acts like a child, and they don’t really know where they fit in. Theatre helps them to connect with the beautiful child they have inside them – it’s almost metaphysical. I don’t say that to them, of course, because then I hear, “I ain’t gonna be no child,” all that kind of stuff, but that’s really what it’s about. Allowing them to play as children play, at that innocent time in your life when you believed in magic and imagination and you weren’t too cool for all of that.

GL: It’s interesting that you mention empathy, because one of the extraordinary things about your performance is the empathy you show for each character, down to the janitor and the security guard who mans the metal detectors at the school doors.

NS: People don’t always realize that when you walk into a school, the kids are really funny. It’s easy to imagine that public schools are scary, but most of the time the kids are joking around and having a really good time. Some audience members come to the show, and I can see in their eyes, “Why is she making fun of black kids?” I just want to say to them, “Come with me. I’m not exaggerating, I’m doing 10 percent of what they actually do.”

GL: How much of No Child …is based on real incidents?

NS: The whole script is shaped from events that have happened to me. It’s an amalgamation of all my experiences.

GL: Many teachers saw the show while you performed it in New York. How do they respond?

NS: Often they tell me that I encapsulate their years working in the schools. New teachers come in and say, “That’s exactly what I’m going through, and I’m so glad I saw your show because now I have some ideas about what I can do with the kids when certain things happen.” The best way to teach teachers is for them see a teacher failing and succeeding, doing a great job and then messing up.

GL: You’ve performed No Child … more than four hundred times in New York City. Are you curious about how it will be received in Boston?

NS: Yes. Teachers have come from all over the country and said they’d like me to bring the show to their cities. Boston is interesting to me because the school system is as segregated as in New York. The situations in the classroom are very similar.

GL: Can we talk about the title? How do you feel about the No Child Left Behind Act?

NS: It leaves a lot to be desired. The amount of testing required for schools to receive their funding weighs heavily on teachers’ minds. Not every school is the same, and the standardized testing creates huge pressures. As teaching artists we can’t spend enough time in the classroom, because the students have to learn to take tests. Also, the arts don’t appear in the language of the act, and that’s troublesome. To eliminate the arts from our schools would be a tragedy. If I were ever to speak to the president of the United States, I’d argue that the arts create well-rounded individuals and better, more questioning citizens.

GL: No Child …so clearly reminds us that the problems in our education system are of vast proportions. Do you feel any hope for the future?

NS: Yes I do. We have to remain hopeful for the kids’ sake. Can you imagine being a teenager and having adults looking at you and saying, “I have no hope for you, teenager”? We have to focus on a hopeful future for them. We’re not helping them at all by regarding them as a lost generation.

Gideon Lester is the A.R.T.’s Acting Artistic Director.

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