No character left behind

Solo performers who project multiple personalities are familiar sights on regional stages: They’re an affordable way to bring the street to subscribers, and they embody the multi-tasking shuffle mode of our 21st century brains.

Major talents such as Danny Hoch and Jefferson Mays have set this genre’s bar high. But Nilaja Sun takes the art of quick change into hyperspeed with “No Child . . . ,” her solo show about theater as urban emergency kit. It opens Friday at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City.

“At first I thought I was at the wrong play,” remembers Center Theatre Group Artistic Director Michael Ritchie, who caught “No Child . . .” off-Broadway. “When she came onstage at the top of the show playing a janitor, I really thought she was a man. Then, within an eye blink, she became a 13-year-old girl. It’s phenomenal acting.”

This virtuosic display of human sampling follows Sun’s struggle to stage a play with a classroom of mouthy, defiant, at-risk teenagers at Malcolm X High, a fictional public school, based on her experiences as a teaching artist over the last nine years. The ellipsis in the show’s title suggests that President Bush’s 2001 education bill affects the ground level somewhat differently than legislators expected.

The play was commissioned, developed and premiered by New York’s Epic Theatre Center, a nonprofit collective devoted to fostering self-expression and civic dialogue in schools. Sun, 33, a longtime member of Epic, teaches classics like “Antigone” and “An Enemy of the People” at “high-impact schools” -- bureaucracy-speak for besieged urban institutions that require students to pass through metal detectors and a heavy police presence just to get to their lockers.

“We were talking one day about public schools being more like prisons than learning environments,” recalls Ron Russell, one of Epic’s founding producers. “Someone remembered the play ‘Our Country’s Good,’ which basically asks the question: Can a civilization be founded in a prison?”

Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 1988 drama is itself a play-within-a-play: Eighteenth-century English prisoners deported to Australia perform a bawdy restoration comedy alongside their jailers. Just as the convicts are liberated by the act of taking on a role different from the one society allows them, a few of Sun’s students find the freedom to imagine something beyond the chaos of their present lives. After shredding nearly every nerve of their director.

What may sound like a predictable journey from hard knocks to triumph shifts into something electric through Sun’s stunning, disciplined performance. Ritchie jumped at the chance to program “No Child . . . ,” which has been touring the country since its Obie-winning run in 2006. “Sun’s play is a great piece of theater with a deeply pertinent social context,” he says. “It doesn’t matter whether your kids go to private school or public school. We’re all affected by this.”

Sun starts out by “composing” in a mirror, perfecting the mannerisms and vocal style of each character before writing anything down. It’s a technical process that embodies the show’s themes: the possibility of genuine connection between students who keep their guard up to get through a day.

“The other day a woman told me, ‘I’m so glad you made this a one-person show; we have so much empathy for each person,’ ” Sun says, speaking by phone from Washington, D.C. “She said, ‘Because it’s just you up there, we see how the system weighs down on one person’s head.’ ”

Sun’s multicultural background supplied a living encyclopedia of gestures, accents and postures to draw from. She grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the only child of a Puerto Rican mother and an African American father. Her mother worked with various downtown settlement houses, and her Italian stepfather was a union man. “I’ve always been around people with a sense of social activism,” she says.

Corralling her chameleon energy was the work of director Hal Brooks, who’s been at the helm of several acclaimed solo shows, including Will Eno’s “Thom Pain,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist. “What I liked about Hal was that he didn’t refer to ‘those kids,’ ” recalls Sun of their initial discussion. “He didn’t ask me to explain them. You know, ‘Why are those kids so bad?’ ”

Brooks shrugs off the compliment. “There was no box to put them in. The students are her. That seemed really clear. My job was just a matter of consolidating the script so that the audience could follow the move from one character to the next.” The director became a gymnastics coach, facilitating the nanosecond shifts between characters. “Nilaja had their voices, how they walked. The question became: How can we see them initially in such a way that the audience can quickly identify them? So each kid got a pose. Jerome has his arms stretched out. Shondricka twirls her hair. Every character has a distinctive look.”

Sun worried the audience wouldn’t get a sense of the anarchic school environment with only half a dozen students, but Brooks felt that ultimately less would be more. “If you try to represent too many characters, the audience can’t chart the story. My argument was basically ‘Welcome Back, Kotter’: Only four of the Sweathogs speak, but you know there’s a whole classroom just like them.”

Clearing the narrative clutter focused the power of Sun’s stage presence. Brooks sees her ability to channel other people so effectively as a result of her hypersensitivity. “Nilaja is completely aware of the audience in a way I’ve never seen. She taps into incredible energy in a way that’s paranormal. After the show she’ll talk to people and know exactly where they were sitting in the house -- literally, which seat.”

Sun recently performed a student matinee in Washington. Upper-middle-class students sat to the side and on the balcony; groups of inner-city students were in the center orchestra seats.

“In the middle of the show I suddenly looked at their body language,” the actress remembers. “The kids on the side and the balcony, the ones whose parents had told them they were going to be something, were all sitting upright. But all the inner-city kids were hunched over, almost in a position of sleep, even though their eyes were open and they were laughing. Years of abuse, oppression, mean words had taken a hold on their bodies. They looked like old people already.” It was as if her own play was reflecting back at her.

Epic’s Russell distinguishes the balance of hope and realism in “No Child . . .” from the more sweeping teacher-based transformations seen in films like “Stand and Deliver” and “Mr. Holland’s Opus.” Though some students progress despite entrenched obstacles, he argues, their individual successes obscure a larger issue. “Nilaja’s play says yes, there is heroism, on the part of both kids and teachers. But she also asks: Why do we force these kids to be heroes? Shouldn’t they just be allowed to be kids?”

Sun is scheduled to perform 10 student matinees at the Kirk Douglas, and she hopes radically different young audiences will be mixed together. “I want the kids to get a chance to see each other,” she says. “We’ll see what happens.”

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‘No Child . . .’

Where: Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sundays. Call for exceptions.

Ends: April 13

Price: $20 to $40

Contact: (213) 628-2772