I cannot remember the last time I left a theater feeling more frustrated or irritated than I was after catching the New York premiere of The Niceties, a short two-act play tracing a clash between a white, middle-aged professor at an elite college and one of her students, an African-American junior, also a woman.
Both characters are clearly intended to be sympathetic. “Conflicts between good and evil can be fun fodder for action films,” the playwright, Eleanor Burgess, observes in her program notes. “But I’m more intrigued by times when smart, well-meaning people, with great values and the best intentions, fundamentally can’t agree on the right way to behave. Kindness or honesty? Idealism or caution? Forgiveness or punishment?”
Sadly, few of these qualities, save for punishment, figure in any meaningful way in Niceties—unless you define honesty as the ceaseless blurting of one’s own opinions and perspectives, with complete disregard to those held by others; or your concept of idealism is limited to promoting your own ideals and interests. True, we’ve seen a great deal of such distortion in our social and political discourse lately, and perhaps Burgess—who notes that Niceties was inspired by an incident at Yale University a few years ago—intended to rile her audience as part of making that point. But as an appeal to our better, saner angels, Niceties doesn’t just fall flat; it actually contests the potential for smart, well-meaning people to cut through the polarization and rancor.
As represented by the two characters here, those people amount to little more than collages of clichés, with the odd contrivance thrown in to dissuade us from seeing them as mere stereotypes. We learn that Zoe, the black student, grew up more affluent than the professor, Janine, who is revealed as a lesbian. It’s as if Burgess decided that she needed to detract a couple of privilege points from the older, more powerful, white woman to level the playing field a bit.
Zoe meets with Janine in the latter’s office, cozily elegant in Cameron Anderson’s set design, with rows of books surrounding a portrait of George Washington and photos of Nelson Mandela and Emiliano Zapata. The junior, who sips from a “venti Starbucks cup” (it’s in the stage directions) has come seeking advice—or affirmation, really—on a paper written for Janine’s history class. Zoe’s thesis, informed largely by online research and her passionate commitment to combating racial injustice, is that the United States was spared a radical revolution by its own oppressive actions. “The people who were really suffering,” she explains in the play, “who would have become radicals, were the slaves. And everybody else, upper middle class white people and poor white people, were pretty happy with the way things were.”
Janine finds this theory invalid and, initially trying to sugar-coat her objections, quickly becomes patronizing. Burgess has some deft fun with this proud liberal lioness of a certain age as she squirms, extolling her pupil’s brave spirit and pointing out that she doesn’t approve of her generation being dismissed as “millennials”—a term that Janine will later, when pressed, hurl back at Zoe like the ugliest profanity.
Despite Burgess’s relative youth, the playwright appears to struggle more with Zoe, who in her consequent actions and words emerges as both a firebrand and a snowflake, not to mention a bit of a fraud—worrying for her own emotional safety and freedom of expression while recklessly denying others theirs; claiming to value justice over academic or professional success when it is, in fact, her distress over possibly not getting the grade she wants that first sends her to Janine’s office, and stokes her indignation.
True, such contradictions can exist in well-meaning people, particularly the young, as social media and our 24/7 news cycle make ever more clear. But in making Zoe seem virtually incapable of empathy—the young woman shows only the briefest, faintest glimmers of fellow feeling or regret, after which her resentment is invariably invigorated—Burgess threatens to diminish the very real weight of her experiences and concerns.
Kimberly Senior’s sensitive but staid direction offers little additional support, to either actress. Jordan Boatman manages to lend some humor and vibrancy to Zoe early on, but her assigned range is mostly restricted to shaken, sullen or irate. Lisa Banes, likewise, is quite good at setting up and sending up Janine’s unconscious entitlement; describing her travels to India to Zoe, the scholar gushes, “The spirituality is—jubilant. And who knew lentils could be so delicious?” But Janine’s sustained airs grow tiresome, and make her seem increasingly, curiously removed as Zoe grows more confrontational and destructive.
Again, Burgess may well be trying to tell us something about the apparent intractability of the problems we face, as Americans “come to disagree with each other more—more intransigently and on more fronts,” as she writes in the playbill. “How do we live in a society together when that’s the case? I think we start by listening.” She’s spot-on right—and when her characters do that, I’ll be listening right back, no doubt feeling a lot less cranky.
