Hamlet, never at a loss for high-wattage words, describes the players who come to the family castle as "the abstract and brief chroniclers of the time." Actors, the melancholy prince understood, hold up a mirror not just to nature but also to the age they live in.
In our era, it is the solitary performer onstage who has presented us with the most vivid accounts of the underreported parts of our world. It is to artists such as Anna Deavere Smith, Dael Orlandersmith, Danny Hoch, Roger Guenveur Smith and Sarah Jones that we turn to find out what lies beyond those overpriced, practically vacuum-sealed condos so beloved by our navel-gazing playwrights. Let's add the name Nilaja Sun to that list of gifted soloists whose dispatches from the battlefield of contemporary life have helped to fill in the gaps of our faulty knowledge and even faultier compassion.
"No Child . . .," Sun's dynamic one-woman show, which opened Friday at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, teems with the students, teachers and staff workers of the fictitious (but all too credible) Malcolm X High School in the Bronx. It's a tough place, more like a penitentiary than a college-prep school, and not the most hospitable environment for a teaching artist such as Ms. Sun, who's invited to conduct drama workshops with kids no one would confuse with those theatrical go-getters Debbie Allen drilled into shape in "Fame."
These are students with psychological and learning challenges, who have trouble sitting still, never mind memorizing lines from "Our Country's Good," Timberlake Wertenbaker's 1988 play about a group of convicts putting on a Restoration comedy in an Australian penal colony. It's an odd choice of drama (the class cynics wonder why they're not getting the usual "A Raisin in the Sun" or "West Side Story"), but by the end the selection makes total sense.
"So the kids are actually gonna be in a play within a play within. . . ." Ms. Sun breathlessly explains to her landlord, who stonily replies that students "need more discipline and less self-expression." But then he's mostly concerned with getting the rent from an often out-of-work actress who, to catch up on her debts, has taken a job that requires her to turn a bunch of academic castoffs into thespians -- a term that provokes Rosie O'Donnell silliness the moment it's introduced.
