Putting dramatic shape on the teaching experience

In this one-woman schoolroom drama, Nilaja Sun draws on her own experience in the NY public school system

FOR A moment it is hard to recognise Nilaja Sun, despite the fact that I have spent the previous hour in her company, watching her play a version of herself, the idealistic “teaching artist” together with 15 other characters in a Bronx public school.

That stage version of Nilaja Sun was irrepressibly optimistic, endearingly naïve and as bright, impassioned and big-hearted as the show that bears her name. The Nilaja Sun who walks into the Edinburgh sunshine, following another sold-out performance of No Child. . . is certainly warm, but wrapped tight in a winter jacket with a knit hat pulled fast over her head, she is nowhere near as expansive. As the show's energy dissipates she takes time to gently decompress.

“Performing the show basically feels like operating at another soul level,” she says. “I’ve used all the senses over the last hour and now I have to go back to being human.” Sun, who based her one-person performance on her own experiences working in the New York public school system, first came to the job as a fitfully employed actor. In the play it becomes more than a vocation; it becomes a means to inspire her initially unruly class. “From now on we are nothing but thespians,” she tells an incredulous room of mouthy 10th graders, who hear something else. “It means actor, citizen, lover of all things great.” The show’s achievement is also its metaphor; the ability of perform- ance to effect transformation, the power of imagination to change circumstance.

On stage, Sun delivers a virtuoso display of multi-role playing: she is the omniscient old janitor, moving about the stage like an ironing board taking a stroll; the sassy drama queen Shondrika; the hyperactive kid, Brian, and an alpha-male named Jerome, whose tough exterior is the clear consequence of an underprivileged world in which you grow up fast.

Was it difficult to give a dramatic shape to her experience? "It wasn't that challenging," she says, "because I actually created it as if it were a lesson plan." Those plans, constructed to work out the rhythms of introducing kids – variously euphemised in the play as "spirited" or "academically and emotionally challenged youths" – to the power of Shakespeare, follow specific energy patterns: from the crazy first initiation, through periods of calm and calamity, towards the fraught presentation of a performance. Directed by Hal Brooks, No Child. . . introduces itself to the audience in similar stages: as we meet the class we acclimatise to its frenetic style. It is, in form and content, a learning experience.

"These were all real stories," says Sun. "At the same time it was important that the audience love at least one kid." In part, that is because Sun wants to put a face to a statistic and to combat a stereotype. As the play's title indicates, she was inspired by the No Child Left Behind Act, a pet-project of George W Bush when he was US president which made schools accountable for the success or failure of their students. "Which is totally admirable," she considers. "But what happens is that a lot of teachers feel the pressure to 'teach the test' – how to take it – and they find that once things go in, students take the test and then it completely goes out. And that's not teaching. It was kind of like the elephant in the room when I created it." The schools themselves, she admits, can be intimidating places. Malcolm X High, the fictitious school in which No Child. . . is set, has clear echoes of Martin Luther King Jr High School, where Sun has taught, but she maintains it is a composite of several schools.

Many of them have bars on their windows and metal detectors at their doors. “That’s when I first encountered the challenge of these schools,” she says. “I was almost like, ‘Oh my God, get me the hell out of here’. It wasn’t that the kids were crazy, but the situation was crazy.”

At one distressed moment in the play, Sun's character complains to the principal, "It seems to me that this whole school system is falling apart . . . We're not teaching them to be leaders. We're getting them ready for jail." Offstage, Sun elaborated: "The biggest tragedy is that their minds are in prison, even if they aren't. They should know that it's not just The Man who put you there; you can literally choose to get your mind out of it." It's a testament to the restraints Sun largely places on sentimentality that the play the students in No Child. . . are preparing to stage is Tiberlake Wertenbaker's 1998 drama, Our Country's Good, in which a group of 18th-century Australian convicts stage George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer.The parallels between Sun's play and Wertenbaker's are obvious; a belief that performance can allow those that society has marginalised to become someone else. "The theatre is an expression of civilisation," goes Wertenbaker's text, and it chimes distinctly with Sun's artistic philosophy.

“Most students know from the start that the work I do is important to the world. It’s not just entertainment,” she says. “Part of school is about creating great citizens. When kids come from low-income, under- privileged, high-risk – there’s a million words – ghettos, a lot of them don’t feel like citizens of their own country. The great thing about art, and especially theatre, is that then you have to walk in the shoes of other characters.

“It’s important to know that there is a bigger world out there and other people are actually going through a lot of the same things they’re going through.” Sun’s play allows itself much hope, uplift and a couple of cheering lapses into outright fantasy, but it tempers it with an acknowledgement that exposure to art will not solve all society’s ills or inequalities. In many respects it is a love letter to teachers everywhere, but an international success for four years now, I wondered who Sun considered the play was for.

“Here’s who it was written for,” she replies. “At three o’clock when all the schools are let out in New York City, the kids descend upon the subways and it’s sometimes mayhem. I can see in the eyes of all the adults: fear, annoyance, disgust. It was really written for people who’ve never been in a school like this before, to at least see or just recognise one kid. That’s all that’s necessary as opposed to just this blur of teenage angst.”

She agrees that her belief in transformation and empathy is a hard-won optimism and she smiles widely at the thought. The Sun I recognised comes out again.

No Child .. . runs from tonight until Sat at Axis: Ballymun as part of the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival