REVIEW by ANTHONY CHASE
Eleanor Burgess's play, The Niceties, plunges the audience into the incendiary depths of a debate between a professor and her student over the exclusion of African Americans from the teaching and writing of American history. While the publicity describes this as a tour de force "about who gets to write history," such a description is disingenuous. At its core, this is a play about differences in strategy, or what the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci called praxis - the unity of theory and practice. The professor believes change must happen slowly and strategically to be sustainable; the student sees ideas and actions as inseparable, demanding immediate cultural rupture.
Second Generation Theatre has staged a well-paced and strongly acted production at Shea's Smith Theatre, directed with confidence by Gabriella Jean McKinley. Her direction shines in navigating the play's complex terrain, modulating the pacing to allow the intricate dialogue to breathe while maintaining audience engagement throughout the prolonged confrontation.
The play centers on Janine, a highly regarded member of the History faculty at an elite college in Connecticut. She is White and is arguably approaching retirement after a stellar career. As the play begins, she meets with Zoe, a gifted young African American undergraduate majoring in Political Science. Zoe has written a paper advancing a thesis that the success of the American Revolution was only possible because of the institution of slavery.
What begins as a friendly academic discussion quickly turns violently contentious. Janine, played by Pamela Rose Mangus, embodies liberal thinking, but also traditional scholarship. Recognizing Zoe’s intellect, after some persuasion, the professor acknowledges that there is merit in the thesis, but she insists that the argument be supported using primary sources. Such documentation is not easily available from the online sources that Zoe prefers, and so Janine instructs her student to go old school: use the library. Zoe, played by Anika Pace, objects that the scarcity of sources makes her task disproportionately difficult compared to students writing on mainstream topics.
Conceding the truth of this, Janine breaks her own rules to grant a one-week extension. This is still unacceptable to Zoe. Because she is heavily involved in upcoming political protests both on campus and in nearby Bridgeport, she has no time. Moreover, she believes her paper is done and should stand on its own merits.
There are limits to Janine’s willingness to be flexible. We all make choices, she says, and our choices have consequences. Janine stands firm and insists that an unsupported paper cannot earn an A.
That’s where Zoe drops the niceties.
Recognizing her inferior position of power, the student determines that more drastic tactics are her only recourse. Conflict erupts.
It is both thrilling and upsetting to watch Mangus and Pace square off in this heated battle of words. Their onstage chemistry creates palpable tension, and both give nuanced, absorbing performances that bring depth and complexity to their characters.
Mangus successfully presents Janine as a multifaceted person, capturing the professor's liberal ideals while revealing her unconscious biases and defensive reactions when challenged. She clearly articulates Janine's journey from initial confidence and arrogance through vulnerability and panic to remorse as her worldview is shaken.
As Zoe, Pace simultaneously conveys passion, intelligence, and vulnerability, successfully embodying the evolution from eager student to fierce advocate while navigating complex emotions of frustration, anger, and hurt, as well as contrite bewilderment at being accused of behaving like the spoiled rich girl she is, despite the moral righteousness of her cause.
This contrast between the women recalled, for me, Gary Wills’s book, Certain Trumpets: the Nature of Leadership, particularly his essays about the reform leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt and the radical or activist leadership of Harriet Tubman.
Wills describes how Eleanor Roosevelt, while attending a concert in the South, was told that the auditorium was segregated. Rather than leave, she asked to be seated on the “colored” side. When she was told that this, too, would be breaking the law, she did not insist. Instead, she asked that her chair be placed in the center aisle.
Roosevelt was a reformer. By contrast when someone escaping slavery got scared and asked to turn back, rather than risk capture, Harriet Tubman pulled a gun on them. Radical leadership doesn’t have time for the niceties.
Janine embodies the characteristics of reformist leaders like Roosevelt who work within existing systems, using diplomacy, compromise, and incremental steps to achieve gradual change. She values traditional historical methods and scholarly rigor, seeing the university system as a vehicle for progress. She has confidence in dialogue and willingly engages in debate with Zoe, attempting to find common ground.
Zoe, conversely, exemplifies the activist leadership model. When she senses she will not win her debate with Janine, she drops all pretense and goes on the attack, telling her professor to "Shut up!" She sees the need for immediate transformation in historical narratives and academic institutions, refusing to engage in "niceties" that might slow progress.
The personal flaws that enable this confrontation include a certain lack of empathy on both sides. Zoe tends to oversimplify Janine’s positions; Janine repeatedly misrepresents Zoe’s. When confronted with her unconscious biases, Janine gets defensive, revealing a myopic tendency to view current issues solely through her personal experience while idealizing charismatic leadership from the past.
Meanwhile, Zoe makes sweeping judgments about Janine based on appearance alone - old and White - while Janine treats Zoe with the same academic standards she applies to any student. Zoe's assumptions about her professor's privileged background and presumed husband's income reveal her own bias; ironically, it's Zoe who comes from the more affluent circumstances. Her moral inconsistencies become increasingly apparent: she condemns Janine for finding humor in Charles James Napier's Latin pun about colonial conquest in India, yet openly delights in the suffering of White people during the opiate crisis. Similarly, while she bristles at being told what to say or do, she has no qualms about demanding and dictating verbatim admissions from her professor. In her rigid idealism, Zoe loses sight of practical considerations and consequences, becoming what she claims to despise - an authority figure demanding compliance.
Finally, we surmise, as Janine suggests, that Zoe might ultimately be a grade grubber who has turned an academic debate into a personal vendetta. In the final moments, when Janine asks a pointed and personal question, "Why me?"
Why did Zoe attack a liberal, progressive thinking, barrier-breaking woman instead of any right-wing horrors on campus, including one who voted for racist George Wallace. The question invites us to examine a possible interpretation: Could Zoe's moral crusade have converged, perhaps unconsciously, with a simpler academic grievance? We recall the moment when the political became deeply personal: Janine had threatened to withhold an A from Zoe, and had the power to do it. Is it possible that in choosing her target, Zoe's revolutionary zeal aligned conveniently with her academic self-interest?
The production's technical elements support its intellectual intensity. Spencer Dick's set successfully evokes both the office of a traditional history professor at an elite institution and echoes the settings of other debate plays, like David Mamet's Oleanna and Race. Costumes by Amaya Mack convincingly evoke character, with Janine's transition from formal rigidity in Act One to defeated informality in Act Two.
McKinley's direction succeeds in bringing this challenging material to life, with Mangus and Pace delivering performances that make the intellectual sparring feel deeply personal and urgently relevant. Through their portrayal of this contentious debate between incremental change and radical action, we see not just an academic disagreement, but a reflection of the ongoing struggle to address historical injustice in our institutions.
The production obliges us to grapple with difficult questions: When does academic rigor become a tool of oppression? When do radical tactics cross the line from necessary disruption to unnecessary destruction? In the end, both Janine's inflexible standards and Zoe's scorched-earth approach exact heavy costs, leaving audiences to wrestle with what price we're willing to pay for change - and who should bear that cost.
The Niceties continues at Shea's Smith Theatre, 658 Main Street, through March 2, 2025.
