The Niceties

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It would be hard to find a timelier, more relevant play around town than Eleanor Burgess’s ironically titled drama now at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Stage II at City Center. In a program note, the author states that she is intrigued by situations “when smart, well-meaning people, with great values and the best intentions, fundamentally can’t agree on the right way to behave.” Based on an incident at Yale in 2015, the two-character play explores the escalating conflict between Zoe (Jordan Boatman), a bright African-American student and her well-regarded professor Janine (Lisa Banes; Arcadia, Isn’t It Romantic). The two meet during office hours to discuss the term paper that Zoe has written for a course in Comparative Revolution. After pointing out a few grammatical and stylistic errors, Janine proceeds to attack Zoe’s thesis that slavery played an important role in preventing the American Revolution from becoming a radical one. After much back and forth, Janine challenges Zoe to find more impressive documentation than internet websites to back up her thesis. She offers Zoe more time to do so, but activist Zoe is more committed to upcoming protests than to her coursework. Their escalating arguments over racism, white privilege, biased curricula and basic philosophies lead to an outburst that has serious consequences for both of them. During the second act, they meet once more to see if they can find common ground to take action that might mitigate the damage that has been done. We do not get the comfort of an easy answer. The play is all the more poignant in that it is set in pre-election 2016, before we fully realized the depth of the chasms dividing the country. The play is not without its flaws: at first the author comes dangerously close to making Janine a caricature, but she partially redeems this with some humanizing information later on. I also would have liked to know more about Zoe’s background. The arguments occasionally become repetitious, but the topics are so timely and important that I didn’t mind. Some have compared the play to Oleanna, which it does resemble in structure, but the issues this play raises make Mamet’s play look trivial by comparison. Both actors are very strong. The set by Cameron Anderson (The Language of Trees) looks convincingly like a book-cluttered office on an Ivy campus. Kara Harmon’s (Dot) costumes are apt. Kimberly Senior’s (Disgraced) direction keeps things moving forward briskly. If you see it, I guarantee you will have lots to talk about afterwards. Running time: one hour 50 minutes, including intermission.