"Play should make you understand something new," says a character in Nilaja Sun's brief, beautiful play, No Child. Good plays can enlighten. Bad plays can, too, even if it's only teaching you something about remaining politely silent and relatively still in a small, hard seat for a couple of hours.

No Child, a one-hour one-act, is the rare short play so good you'll wish it were longer. Amphibian Stage's production at the Fort Worth Arts Center (where the seats are fine) is worth seeing twice. First, for the play itself: a bitterly funny drop-in to the worst class at the most rundown public high school in the Bronx, and the story of how students and teacher connect over a six-week drama workshop. A second viewing is recommended—bring a teacher friend with you—simply to study in detail the knockout performance by the show's sole actor, Rhianna Mack. She plays all 16 roles in No Child, including the 80-year-old janitor/narrator, an autocratic Russian substitute, a terrified Asian teacher, a Puerto Rican grandmother, a chain-smoking principal and 10th-grade students of many accents, attitudes and literacy levels.

Named for Bush 43's 2001 education makeover that reduced American public school curricula to "teaching to the test," No Child is populated by some of the failures. Like the 18-year-old repeating 10th grade and the pregnant 16-year-old, just two of the kids in the rowdy group Miss Sun is supposed to tame in six weeks as a visiting "teaching artist." The real Miss Sun based her play, which she performed to sell-out houses Off Broadway four years ago, on her experiences as a drama teacher in two New York City high schools. In No Child, she's brand new to (fictional) Malcolm X High, a dilapidated pile of bricks in a blighted urban neighborhood just 18 minutes by subway, as one character wryly observes, from Manhattan's 59th Street and one of America's wealthiest blocks of real estate.

The intrepid, dedicated teacher who magically makes angels of a class of listless, profane goof-offs is a familiar trope from movies and stage plays. We've learned life-affirming lessons from Mr. Chips, Miss Brodie and Mr. Holland. With Miss Sun, however, we see a teacher who sticks with her troubled charges for other than purely idealistic reasons. She's an unemployed actress, broke, behind in her rent and in hock to the IRS. Her level of desperation is at a more critical point than some of her students'. In short, she needs the job.

And what show does she want them to study, rehearse and perform? Timberlake Wertenbaker's challenging script Our Country's Good, about 18th century Australian convicts who put on a Restoration comedy for the guards in their penal colony. No Child's play within a play within a play underscores chilling similarities between bleak prison conditions in centuries past and the environment of a modern public high school. After waking up in apartments with barred windows, these kids get to school only to face "two metal-detecting machines, five school guards, two armed police officers and seven metal-detecting wands." The school building, with its falling ceilings and rotting walls, sounds as bad as The Tombs. "All the bathrooms on the third floor, dey broke," says the old janitor who narrates the play. "Now who's accountable for dat?"

No one, apparently. The students in the play stand in for all those public school troublemakers driven to bad behavior by boredom, parental neglect and the sense that the bean-counting, test-score-pimping suits who run the education system would prefer that they didn't show up at all. Miss Sun almost cracks from the pressure of trying to get them jazzed about theater. "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."

Miracles do happen in No Child. The boy too shy to read aloud finds his voice. The girl who rolls her eyes at everything Miss Sun asks of her eventually comes around. The play gets on its feet and some parents even come see it. And Miss Sun sees in the kids what every teacher craves: that moment when the light goes on in their eyes and not only do they get it, they want more.

The luminous tour de force by Rhianna Mack in this show directed by René Moreno is its own brilliant lesson in the transformative power of live theater. Without costume changes or props, she transforms herself from character to character with split-second timing, using her lithe body and expressive face to create the silhouettes and identifying gestures of all the grown-ups and kids. In some of the play's short vignettes, she carries on overlapping conversations among students with such vocal dexterity it's like a new form of ventriloquism.

And here's another thing to admire about Ms. Mack. At the Saturday night performance reviewed, there were a total of eight people in the audience and that included a critic and four ushers. In front of all those empty seats, Mack did No Child as if there were a full house.

Of all the shows running in DFW right now, this is the one that needs and deserves *SRO support.

Don't let it get left behind.

*SRO [Standing Room Only]

No Child... is honest without being preaching, accurate without being over-the-top.

Amphibian Stage Productions

Yes, you should go now. For those of you that like the short and sweet, that's it. If you want to know why I think this is one of the best pieces I've seen all year, keep reading.

Before I get into my review of No Child... (presented by Amphibian Stage Productions at Fort Worth Community Arts Center through November 21), I should probably offer this disclaimer that I have spent a great deal of my life as an arts educator; 10 years in inner city public schools, seven years teaching at the university level. In fact, I still work on a national level as an arts educator. So, a play about teachers, students, and the arts, will speak to me quite deeply, as this one did.

Nilaja Sun, a Lower East Side native, worked as a teaching artist in New York City public schools for eight years, bringing arts to students that had likely not had an artistic experience before. This piece contains a variety of students, teachers, parents, and, I'm sure, real life anecdotes that all coalesce into a single story. In this case, it is a group of students at Malcolm X High School that Ms. Sun is trying to coordinate into a production of Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good. This Australian play concerns a bunch of inmates performing theater in a prison.

In Amphibian's production, Rhianna Mack has the challenge of bringing to life 16 different characters without the benefit of costume changes, make-up, or of time offstage. This monodrama is a 60-minute nonstop showcase of slick, smart storytelling and provides an excellent look at the inner workings of the education system.

The most obvious result is a test-results-based school system that ignores everything except the statistical bottom line. It is standard practice now that if something is not on a test or a subject is not even tested (like the arts), it is cut from the curriculum. This teaching-to-the-test has resulted in a generation of unskilled students that feel minimum hoop jumping is all that is needed to succeed in life, as that's all they've been taught. Teachers are also leaving the field in droves as the pressure, the angry parents, and the lack of freedom to really ... teach ... burns them out.

All of this is apparent in No Child... Sun's script brilliantly takes us from the narrator custodian, who has been at the school for decades and can chronicle the social and educational changes, to the contemporary students, teachers, and administrators who live with the problems. It includes the politics, language, and attitudes that are very much present in the educational system today. In watching this piece, I see my administrators, fellow teachers, and most importantly my kids. Your kids. Our kids. That's why a piece like this is so compelling. It is honest without being preaching, accurate without being over-the-top, and the internal story is something I've had to do myself.

All of this is wonderful, but it must be brought to life by an incredibly talented actor. Rhianna Mack is more than that. With full use of her body for postures, expert control of her face for personality, and a delightful finesse of voice for characterization, Mack creates a completely believable and compelling world on stage. Mack nails the slouch of the teen boy, the sass and hair tap of the teen girl, the walk of an elderly man; each touch is well-crafted and precisely executed in a rapid-fire series of changes that make other quick change shows look weak for need of spectacle. I would love to go into more detail, but I don't want to give away anything.

Director Rene Moreno has done an outstanding job with this piece. His use of the stage and pacing of the storytelling demonstrates excellence in theatre. Sean Urbantke has created an awesome setting for this story. His multi-level platforms represent the many types of floors in a public school building. The furniture is edu-functional. Fencing and flyers make up a back wall. All of this sits below Aaron Lentz's light design, a mix of industrial office/school lighting blended with theatrical elements. David Lanza's sound design includes effects and music all well chosen and nicely executed.

If any theater is fulfilling their mission "to produce innovative and engaging works of theatre that challenge the way we see the world around us," it is Amphibian. They are also donating monies from raffle drawings and tickets to organizations like The Trevor Project, Imagination Celebration, and EASL.

I recommend you get schooled.

Most of us have been fortunate enough in our educations to encounter a special teacher who was in a class by herself. But in No Child ..., the Amphibian Productions show that opened last weekend at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center, Rhianna Mack is a class by herself.

This one-woman autobiographical play by Nilaja Sun is set in a rough Bronx high school where she has been sent as a "teaching artist" to guide a 10th-grade class through a production called Our Country's Good. But Sun is not going to work with the best and the brightest from the drama club. Instead, she is asked to ride herd over the school's worst misfits and turn them into a cast.

What ensues is a sort of updating of Welcome Back, Kotter, but with a lot more intelligence and heart -- and the jaw-dropping talent of Mack.

One by one, Mack introduces us to her recalcitrant charges and the school staff. One second she is a tough-talking teenage male or a ditzy female student. The next she's the school's elderly janitor or gravel-voiced principal.

Mack does not delineate these students and teachers by just voices. The most impressive aspect of her numerous portrayals is that each has its own body language. And it is hard to imagine how this script could have been given any better care than it receives from Mack and director Rene Moreno.

About the only quibbles might be that we have seen these kids and this school before -- from Kotter all the way back to the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle. Also, a coda delivered by the janitor (the show's unofficial narrator) is so ridiculously overstated that it undermines the reality and credibility of what has gone before.

But those faults wilt in the blazing glow of Mack's performance.