‘The Niceties’ (downstairs) @ Theatre 3 / Too

Photos by Jeffrey Schmidt

—Jan Farrington

A revved-up audience crowded into Theatre Three’s downstairs (Theatre Too) space for opening night of Eleanor Burgess’ 2018 play The Niceties. And, as if to reinforce the irony of the title, the polite, well-mannered “niceties” fell by the wayside in the first ten minutes of performance.

Seems about right for the “interesting” times we’ve been through.

In a calm, book-lined academic office, a professor and student at an eminent Ivy League university (playwright Burgess based the story on an incident at Yale, her alma mater) bend their heads together above the first draft of an undergraduate history paper on how slavery affected the American Revolution. Professor Janine (Krista Scott) is white and tenured; student Zoe (Nicole Renee Johnson) is Black and young. Both are female.

The professor’s comments and suggestions on sentence structure and minor grammatical errors go over well, as does a point about looking for vivid true stories/anecdotes from history to create a livelier, more engaging prose style.

But then (and the moment makes us all sit up straight) Janine tells Zoe that the central argument of her paper is…I can’t recall the word, but she means “junk.” Zoe, she says, is facing a major rewrite, and before that, a lot more research. Zoe has a theory of why and how the American Revolution played out as it did, both then and in the centuries after. No serious historian, Janine says bluntly, would agree with her.

The year, apparently, is 2016. The professor implies that Zoe might want to lighten up, citing the Black president we’ve voted into office, and the woman president we’re about to have. A low murmur runs through the audience. And while Burgess’s well-written script (it premiered in 2018) seems dated by certain political arguments and stances that seem tame in contrast to our current world, it does get us back to a still-vital question:

Why can’t we talk about this?

Director Sasha Maya Ada and assistant director Erin Malone Turner draw and support strong, complicated performances from both actors; Scott and Johnson stop in their tracks more than once to just look at one another, blank-faced and unbelieving. We’ve seen that expression: You think what? And though their conversations tend to follow the same circular path—from quiet incredulity and anger to louder, less temperate statements of just how wrong the other is—the directing team gives each separate circle its own tone and flavor.

It’s as if we’re seeing a cluster of Olympic rings forming from Zoe and Janine’s increasingly dark encounters—the words circle and jab, though no medals will be given at the end. But circular doesn’t always mean pointless. We could, and perhaps should, be brought down by the futility of their face-off, but somehow I gathered up some shredded pieces to take home and think about.

Playwright Burgess keeps us on the string, hoping for common ground, snatching at every laugh line that comes by. One conversation may end in shouting and stalemate, but here’s another one starting: Zoe comes in the office door—and after a long pause, Janina and she “begin again.” It’s the title of Princeton professor Eddie S. Glaude’s 2020 book about James Baldwin (and America now), a study of our multiple attempts at protests, promises, legislation, forward movement…and then, in every era, the white backlash.

At a point late in the play, when Zoe’s demands may be more than Janine (and the rest of the faculty) will meet, there’s a moment when the two characters stand outside themselves, avatars of Baldwin’s vision of that national cycle of progression and backlash.

“You have to give up some of your power,” says Zoe. “Because you have too much.” Asked. And the answer, if American history tells us anything, will be found in the Fugitive Slave Act, the Civil War, the Jim Crow laws, lynchings, Civil Rights battles—and most recently, in the destructive events of the past decade.

Johnson’s layered and fiery performance as Zoe keeps us off-kilter and engaged. Her emotions are right on the surface. Professors, she says, watch her as if she’s “a bomb about to go off.” She keeps a busy schedule of organizing, marching, protesting—and at first, seems “up” only for a quick critique of her draft paper. There is so much going on with her we have trouble getting a “fix” on her true self.

Krista Scott plays Janine as cool and disciplined, a more guarded person than Zoe. But when she states a broader objection to Zoe’s paper (Does Janine know, or not, that Zoe will push back?), she sets in motion a sequence that will let them both reveal more of their beliefs and emotions—in moments of humor, frustration, and genuine fury.

Janine, sometimes speaking hesitantly, even awkwardly (Is it a character trait or a part of the settling-in process of early performances?), recalls her Polish family’s flight from war and oppression, the years of poverty they endured in the U.S., and her lack of Ivy League credentials. Zoe holds tight to her collective trauma and personal anger as a Black American woman, feels her social isolation from white classmates and teachers—and carries the emotional burden of the walking wounded. Janine sees her own generations of injustice and pain, and reaches compulsively (“You show me yours; I’ll show you mine.) for comparisons.

Time for more of those moments of silent staring: Don’t you see that my burden is just as heavy (heavier, perhaps) and genuine as yours? Don’t you respect where I have come from? Why do you wave away my pain?

Our sympathies rocket back and forth between the characters—and of course, chances are we “understand” more about the one who looks/seems more like us. Experiencing these exchanges (so familiar!) at warp speed and volume compresses the air in the theatre and sends clear thinking right out the window. Are we absorbing a piece of theater in the spirit of community and discussion—or getting hotly, emotionally involved in the clash?

Directors Ada and Turner don’t let us off the hook, not a bit. The Niceties poses an existential puzzle we have yet to solve—and can’t let go of. Unsettling lights/music/sounds (by designers John Moss II and Claudia Martinez) bookend the two parts of the play, and converge to send a message of chaos: You thought 2016 was bad?

Were Zoe to begin again, to re-write her paper in 2025 (those incompletes will kill your GPA), she might never get to the end of her research—though she could find eye-opening new evidence to support her theories about race and revolution in our “united” states. It’s always worth another try…isn’t it?

WHEN: September 18-October 12, 2025
WHERE: 2688 Laclede Street, Dallas
WEB: theatre3dallas.com