No Child… Opens Tonight
- Thu, Oct 9th 2008, 8:00pm
- Located at : 672 Main Street, Buffalo NY
Theatre Plus presents the WNY premiere of the one woman theatrical hit No Child… by Nilaja Sun with the opening performance tonight. No Child…, set in a fictitious urban public school, has collected numerous awards including a 2007 Obie Award, a 2007 Lucille Lortel Award and both 2007 Outer Critics Circle Awards for Best New American Play and Outstanding Solo Performance. No Child… also took top honors at the 2007 U.S. Comedy Arts Festival Awards and the 2007 Theater World Awards, the play will star local actor Victoria Perez and will be directed by Theatre Plus Artistic Director Kim Piazza.
Nilaja Sun’s groundbreaking story teems with the students, teachers and staff of Malcolm X High School, which is more like a penitentiary than a place of learning. As a new ‘teaching artist’, the heroine faces students with countless psychological and learning challenges, who have trouble sitting still, never mind memorizing lines from “Our Country's Good”, by Timberlake Wertenbaker, a 1988 play about a group of convicts in an Australian penal colony in the late 1780s.
The playwright, Nilaja Sun suggests (through over 16 characters, including an elderly janitor, a Jamaican gum-popping, metal detector wielding security guard and countless students and teachers), that President George W. Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind Initiative’, which calls for continual testing, has hindered educators searching for desperate ways to rescue an educational system careening out of control. The performance is at its’ tragic-comic best when vocalizing the classroom cacophony – the racist and sexist name-calling, the thuggish attitudes, and the distracted insanity- that forces actual instruction to take a back seat to crowd control. At its core, No Child… calls attention to the promise we have to millions of children, both nationally and here in Buffalo, a promise to a future.
October 9, 8PM; $20 general/$10 students
Through October 25
Main Street Cabaret
672 Main St
716.886.9239
