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"New Kid" has only a single idea, but it's a first-rate one - and just as playwright Dennis Foon has explored it enough, his drama ends gracefully.
Tarradiddle Players start their season with this compact favorite, which seems to come each time a fresh crop of elementary schoolers is on hand.
Young Nick (Salvador Garcia) is moving to America from Homeland with his parents, of whom we see only his soft-spoken mom (Darlene Parker). He has the usual linguistic difficulty in school, where he meets welcoming tomboy Mencha (Leslie Ann Giles) and prejudiced Mug (Stephen Seay).
Foon has come up with a clever gimmick: The Homelanders speak their own language to us and to each other, but the words are in English. The Americans speak something they call English, but it's a semi-comprehensible, polyglot chatter. So we're immediately on Nick's side, because we also feel like aliens here.
Foon takes a few moments to explore in passing the dilemmas immigrants face: asking their fluent children to translate for them, staying out of public places where a lack of communication may shame them. Like many immigrants' kids, Nick speaks his own tongue at home and his newly acquired language elsewhere.
Director Matt Cosper keeps the show simple, making it gently funny in its misunderstandings and touching in the hurtful moments that come from unreasoning prejudice. We end on a hope of harmony between Mug and Nick, but no guarantee of it: They may have to live uneasily side by side, as so often happens in America.
Adults should be amused by the linguistic jokes small kids may not get, as they take in this "English" cobbled together from other languages and corny puns. If you start thinking of hamburgers and hot dogs as "Grossa Mac and Bakie Lassie," you may have to put away that backyard grill for good.
