American education and its failures have been in the news so long that it’s questionable whether most people read the stories anymore, with their concentration on statistics and soporific words like “testing” and “standards.”

But numbers only tell part of the story. Nilaja Sun’s multi-character, one-woman theater piece No Child … puts a human face on the problems. Based on her experiences conducting drama workshops for inner-city New York kids, No Child ... opens with Baron (“the first Negro janitor here”), limping as he pushes his broom and narrates visiting artist Sun’s adventures at the fictional (but oh, so familiar) Malcolm X High School in the Bronx. No Child... plays through April 13 at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City.

Sun is assigned to work with Miss Tam’s 10th graders, where arrival 25-30 minutes into the 41-minute class is common, if not the norm. Sun’s intention is to get these kids to perform Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, about an Australian penal colony in which prisoners perform a Restoration comedy.

The wisdom of her goal is at issue when she tells them “You’ll be reading a play,” prompting immediate comments like “We gotta READ?” and “Oh, hell, no.” But the significance of this choice is made clear when Sun makes this observation about New York public schools, with their armed security guards and metal detectors: “We’re getting them ready for jail.”

Sun persists with her teenage cast. Shondrika has lots of attitude and plenty of sass, but she also wants to be center stage. There’s Phillip, who can barely be heard, and Jerome, and Jose, all at risk and distrustful of the importance or even the relevance of education.

Try as she will, cooperation is not forthcoming. Finally, the job seems just too daunting and she resigns, but is talked into returning by Jerome, who brings her to tears with his recitation of a speech she’d assigned him from the play: “Theater is an expression of civilization. The convicts will be speaking a refined, literate language and expressing sentiments of a delicacy they are not used to. It will remind them that there is more to life than crime, punishment.”

Sun morphs seamlessly into her 16 characters, from Baron to Miss Tam to the principal to a Russian teacher with a penchant for discipline, a security guard and several of the students. She does it without costume or makeup changes, using inflection, posture, facial expression, speech styles, accents and attitude, and every one is spot on. A friend and survivor of the New York public school system told me she was prepared to be angry at any sniff of phoniness, but found none.

The title comes from the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” act. Regardless whether that program is working or ever could work, it is clear that too many children are being left behind.

Sun won an Obie and several other awards in 2007 for No Child … Run, don’t walk, to get a ticket for this important new play.

No Child plays through April 13 at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City. Shows Tuesday through Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday at 1 and 6:30 p.m. For tickets call 213-628-2772 or visit www.centertheatregroup.org.

The escapades of a liberated but fatherless English family in the late 1800s are on display in George Bernard Shaw’s You Never Can Tell, playing through March 23 at the Avo Playhouse in Vista. Jason Heil directs.

Mrs. Clandon (Jill Drexler), a freethinking author, has spent the last 18 years in something like exile in Madeira raising her three children alone. They now return to England and are staying at a hotel at the Devon seaside.

The play opens in the dental office of Valentine (Jason Maddy), taking care of his first patient, Dolly Clandon (Rachael VanWormer). Dolly is a silly, giddy teenager whose twin brother Phillip (Tom Zohar) exhibits the same characteristics.

Dolly and Phillip have a pretty elder sister named Gloria (Christy Yael); when she turns up at the office and locks eyeballs with Valentine, their fate is sealed – but not before he manages to defrost her carefully studied ice queen routine. All three Clandon kids nag mother about their father’s identity – until they realize he is Valentine’s landlord Crampton (Jim Chovick), the sort who complains a lot and cracks walnuts with his teeth (and will therefore need Valentine’s services – get the circularity?).

Also in the cast is the obligatory servant who knows more than those above his station, and has better lines. This is the waiter William, splendidly played by Walter Ritter.

You Never Can Tell contains familiar themes of social respectability and family provenance and also touches on old reliable Shavian themes of marriage, feminism and women’s rights. The dialogue is fast and furious and sports both good lines like “In London, you can know a man for 20 years without knowing that he hates you like poison” and more labored ones like “Women must unlearn the false manners of their slavery in order to learn the true manners of their freedom.”

This production is lovely, due in large part to Jeanne Reith’s spectacular costumes and Mike Buckley’s simple but effective set design. Aside from Ritter’s terrific waiter, Yael is great as the bitch-in-training Gloria and John Garcia adds fun to the proceedings in a small role as a solicitor.

You Never Can Tell is silly, frothy stuff, not at all vintage Shaw, and if it reminds you of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, that may be because Shaw started the play shortly after reviewing a performance of Earnest. He noted that “it amused me ... but unless comedy touches me as well ... it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening.”

In my opinion, if Shaw wanted You Never Can Tell to be more than merely amusing, he failed. But it certainly does provide an enjoyable evening’s entertainment.

You Never Can Tell plays through March 23 at the Avo Playhouse in Vista. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m.; matinee Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets call 760-724-2110 or visit www.moonlightstage.com.

In ballparks all over this country, fan are lining up for tickets and digging out their baseball caps and sunglasses.

Chicago Cubs fan extraordinaire Joe Mantegna, like thousands of other Chicagoans, has suffered with his team for many years. Winners of back-to-back World Series in 1907-08 and participants in the Big Show seven times since then, the poor Cubbies haven’t even been able to claim “bridesmaid” status since 1945, their last appearance in the Series. But there’s always next year, right?

OnStage Playhouse presents Bleacher Bums, Mantegna’s paean to the fans of the boys of summer, through April 5. Bruce Wilde directs.

In Wrigley Field on a sunny day in 1998, hopeful fans gather for a game against the St. Louis Cardinals. These aren’t just any fans; these are diehards, fanatics, friends who always sit in this section of the bleachers, where they eat, argue, bet with each other and most of all, hope this is the year. That this never is the year is part of the existential angst and, I suppose, the charm of the story.

Mantegna’s bleacher bums are Zig (James P. Tarbert), dedicated fan and bettor on “sure things” and his wife Rose (Connie Terwilliger); Decker (Jerry Young), who’s been a fan forever; “blind from birth” Greg (Nathan Dean Snyder) who gets play-by-play on the radio; geeky scorekeeper Richie (Brandon Cano-Errecart) and anti-fan anybody-but-the-Cubs Marvin (Stephen P. McLaughllin), who makes lots of money betting against the home team. Strays who wander in this day are bikini-clad blonde bombshell Melody (Angie Doren,) “The Kid” (Melanie Haag) and a Cheerleader (Daniella Trimble), who tries to energize the increasingly depressed fans.

Bleacher Bums began in 1977 as an idea in Mantegna’s brain. He was performing at the time with Chicago’s famed Organic Theatre Company. The company was almost broke and in a brainstorming session Mantegna voiced his idea for a play about Cubs fans shown in the bleacher seats at Wrigley Field. The company (which included Dennis Franz and Dennis Farina) went to games whenever they could to watch the fans, then returned to the theater and did improvisational scenes as their newfound characters.

Four weeks later, Bleacher Bums opened to huge houses. It moved to New York the next year, then back to Chicago for another long run. It still holds the record for longest-running show in Los Angeles – 10 years.

Bleacher Bums is a show for fans, and works well enough on that level. Cano-Errecart’s Richie is my favorite character – the socially inept scorekeeper with pencils but no evident paper or scorecart, who peers through big glasses and acts in socially inappropriate ways.

But leave your non-baseball fan friends at home; they are likely to feel that the only thing duller than watching a baseball game yourself is watching somebody else watch one.

Bleacher Bums plays through April 5 at OnStage Playhouse in Chula Vista. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets call 619-422-7787 or visit www.onstageplayhouse.org.