On Education
One-Woman Show Holds Up a Mirror to Teachers’ Lives
One-Woman Show Holds Up a Mirror to Teachers’ Lives
Six rows from the stage, Dan Lilienthal took his seat,
placing his messenger’s satchel carefully between his feet. It
contained his weekly planner, a couple of novels he was reading with
his sixth graders, and a textbook from the graduate-school class he was
taking. The bag went everywhere with him, even to the theater on
Saturday night, when some people thought teachers didn’t work.
In Mr. Lilienthal’s family,
they knew otherwise. For nearly four generations, from his grandmother
to his younger cousins, his relatives have been teachers, eight in all.
Even now, he was sitting next to his sister Dana, who taught at a
junior high on Long Island. They had both heard their mother say so
many times: “This is a noble profession. Hard, but noble.”
Around
them, the lights dimmed and then rose in the Barrow Street Theater in
Greenwich Village, and Nilaja Sun went into her one-woman show, “No
Child.” She played every part in the story of a drama teacher, not
unlike herself, trying to coax, cajole and inspire a Bronx class to
perform a play.
And then came this one particular scene. One of
the students had stopped going to school, just days before he was
supposed to be in the class play. Ms. Sun kept calling the boy’s home,
leaving messages, all unanswered. Finally, reaching a grandmother who
spoke only Spanish, she teased out the explanation: the student’s
brother had been killed by a gang.
For Mr. Lilienthal, looking
on, the membrane between fact and fiction dissolved. He thought of that
boy in his sixth-grade class who was 13, and still reading at
second-grade level. One day he started shouting, kicking over chairs
and climbing onto a tabletop. Mr. Lilienthal took him out of the
classroom and to a computer lab, and told him to write about what was
bothering him.
When Mr. Lilienthal checked on the boy later in
the period, he saw on the computer screen the letters “R.I.P.” and the
words “sunrise” and “sunset,” each followed by a date. The boy asked
him how to spell “remembering.” His cousin, 20 years old, had just
died. That loss, Mr. Lilienthal realized, was what the day’s outburst
had been all about.
Now, on a Saturday night in an Off Broadway
theater, Ms. Sun and “No Child” were reassuring Mr. Lilienthal that he
was not alone. The struggles he felt were not just a function of being
a first-year teacher in a tough neighborhood like Brooklyn’s Red Hook.
They went with the work he had chosen.
“Just to realize how
common it is,” he said a few days later, ruminating on the play. “So
many teachers in a city school have a kid who’s lost somebody. When a
kid’s acting out, you learn it’s because of something severe. So you
need to be extra compassionate and extra persistent. You need to be
there even if the student doesn’t come seeking you out.”
In six
months and 170 performances, “No Child” has served this confirming and
cathartic role for thousands of teachers. While the show has been
lavishly praised by drama critics, these educators are the ultimate
experts. The symphony of murmurs and sighs one hears from them during
the show, the raucous laughter at jokes that elude the general public,
attest to just how accurately Ms. Sun has held her mirror to their
lives.
It is her own life, too, for “No Child” grew out of the
eight years she spent as a guest artist in New York’s public schools.
During the last two — divided between Martin Luther King Jr.
High School in Manhattan and the Bronx High School for Writing and
Communication Arts — the state arts council and the Epic Theater Center
underwrote Ms. Sun with the goal of developing a one-woman show.
“When
I wrote the piece, I thought I’d be doing it for three weeks for the
standard theatergoing audience,” Ms. Sun recalled. “But by the third
preview, I started to get this sense of teachers enveloping this show.”
She has performed “No Child” for several hundred teachers at events in Rochester and at Hofstra University
on Long Island. The teachers’ union in New York City had her do the
show at a training session for new teachers. The schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein,
attended one night. More typically, teachers in small groups find their
way to Barrow Street, drawn both by word-of-mouth and $20 last-minute
tickets for educators.
After one performance, a teacher
approached Ms. Sun to confide, “I have kids who are doing great things
and I have kids who are in jail for murder and I don’t know how to help
them.” Another time, a mother introduced her son to Ms. Sun and said,
“My child is one of the ones left behind.”
MS. SUN knows the
teachers are out there by the sound. She hears the knowing laughter
when, in the role of the principal, she says, “We need all these kids
to pass five Regents in the next two months.” It happens again when the
class revolts against doing the play and the principal retaliates by
threatening to ban them from the school trip to Great Adventure.
For
all its humor, though, “No Child” is no palliative. At one point in the
show, Ms. Sun as the drama teacher tries to resign. “I came to teaching
to touch lives and educate and be this enchanting artist in the
classroom,” she says, “and I have done nothing but lose 10 pounds in a
month and develop a disgusting smoking habit. These kids need something
much greater than anything I can give them. They need a miracle — and
they need a miracle like every day.”
A 25-year-old in charge of
conjuring those miracles, Mr. Lilienthal understood the emotion all too
well. So he took some sustenance from the fact that Ms. Sun did wind up
staying and putting on the class play.
“You come across this
resistance and it shatters your idealism,” he said. “You experience
this immediate frustration — how far below grade level the kids are and
the way they’re acting out. You start to wonder why you’re teaching.
You get so disillusioned. So just to know that Nilaja Sun was able to
bring her passion to the students, and that it worked. You have a
curriculum to teach, but you need to bring yourself.”
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