Lela Elam's Elan

The story is this: A woman is hired to teach theater to a bunch of tenth-graders in the Bronx. They jeer at her. They test her. But she challenges them and, against long, long odds, wins them over. Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh. To say that No Child... bears an unfortunate resemblance to certain older plays and movies would be an understatement. In fact, if you've seen Blackboard Jungle/To Sir, with Love/Class of 1984/The Principal/Stand and Deliver/Lean on Me/Class of 1999/Sister Act II/Dangerous Minds/The Substitute/Freedom Writers/The Class, you've seen this. I'd rank No Child... right between Dangerous Minds and Stand and Deliver, though it's funnier than either and a lot less unsettling. But really — how could one of these tales be unsettling at this date in the subgenre's history? Happily for No Child..., plenty of teens will see this play, which is probably director Joe Adler's whole MO in producing the thing. (As well as Nilaja Sun's MO in writing it — she is an old hand in the public schools herself, and No Child... is half-reportage.) Earlier this year, Adler's GableStage mounted a production of Macbeth for South Florida's schoolchildren — out of pocket, by the way, since state funding has dried up — and this show, too, will go on the road through SoFla's public high schools. Teenagers usually don't know a cliché when they see one and thus will likely find No Child... touching. And for those little miscreants who might otherwise be bored by or at least affect boredom at live theater, Lela Elam's one-woman domination ought to be a very effective attention-grabber.
April 23-May 17, 2009