THE LEFT BEHIND

Frankly, I was in theater hell this Saturday afternoon. Two women on one side of me were whispering to one another throughout the first 10 minutes of the show; a man on the other side was eating something out of a crinkly bag and repeatedly clearing his throat. People in front of us kept turning to look at the whisperer until I reprimanded her with my finger in front of my lips. She promptly shut up, and the man apparently finished his snack.

Thank goodness they did, because playwright Nilaja Sun’s one-woman show No Child… is an impressive piece of work completely deserving of full attention. Valyn Lyric Turner’s portrayal of some seventeen characters, ranging from the school janitor to the principal and multiple students and teachers is not just a tour de force. It is an eloquent portrayal of the tragedies of urban education. Gloucester Stage producing artistic director Rebecca Bradshaw first read the script for No Child… several years ago. A November 2024 strike by teachers in Gloucester and neighboring communities provided the impetus she needed to stage it this summer.

Turner portrays Ms. Sun, a visiting artist brought to a Bronx high school under a grant to pull together a play called Our Country’s Good about convicts in 18th-century Australia. The tenth graders she is supposed to work with are a group of “emotionally and academically challenged” students who declare themselves “the worst class in the school,” a status they claim with perverse pride.

It’s easy to believe they might be the worst class in the school—when Ms. Sun arrives, they greet her efforts with dismissive insults, resistant postures, rolled eyes, and irrelevant comments. Turner’s portrayal of each student through accents and speech, body language, and facial expressions is fascinating. She’s one woman on the stage, but she fills the space with the illusion that we are observing a classroom full of angry and struggling students.

Eventually, the students drive their English teacher to quit, an event that only confirms their belief in their own worthlessness—an assessment reinforced by their treatment in the school, where they are surrounded by armed cops, metal detectors, and security guards who challenge their right to move about freely. Ms. Sun gets the students to recognize the similarities between their own plight and that of the convicts in Australia, but even those insights are not enough for these students to invest themselves in a creative enterprise or find the courage to perform.

Ms. Sun is ready to give up after all her efforts fail. And why should these students be interested in this play? They have bigger problems, all revealed in the course of the performance: siblings killed in street violence and lack of decent nutrition (one student reports a breakfast of orange juice and a Little Debbie cake). Their parents and relatives won’t be attending the play—they don’t have the kinds of jobs that allow them to take time off to see a play and even if they could, they can’t afford the additional subway fare. No one, including the students themselves, thinks most of them are headed for any kind of future except jail.

It’s hard to believe that Turner, who won an Elliot Norton Award for her role in A Raisin in the Sun in 2024, has never performed a one-person show before. Yet working with the astute and insightful director Pascale Florestal, she brings this collection of unique adults and adolescents to life. Thanks to their collaboration, we gain insights into the plight of those children who are “left behind” — and the educators who struggle to reach them.

photos by Jason Grow

No Child…
Gloucester Stage Company
267 East Main Street in Gloucester, MA
75 minutes, no intermission
Wed and Thurs at 7:30; Fri at 8; Sat at 3 & 8; Sun at 3
ends on August 23, 2025
for tickets, call 978.281.4433 or visit Gloucester Stage

for more shows, visit Theatre in Boston