The Niceties at New Mexico Actors Lab

In Eleanor Burgess’ The Niceties, Zoe, a black 20-year-old undergraduate, is called to a meeting with Janine, a liberal white Ivy League professor, to discuss Zoe’s paper on the effect of slavery on American history. Their meeting begins respectfully, but subsequent meetings steadily deteriorate into personal assaults and the unmasking of the professor’s unconscious biases. Set in 2016 during the fateful presidential primary campaign, The Niceties was described by the Los Angeles Times as “a shrewd piece of writing.... (that) takes a crowbar to the jagged generation gap between those in power and the disruptive new thinkers radical enough to expose the way their elders — including many who identify as progressives — so often pull the ladder up after themselves, as if to defend whatever hard-fought advances they have made.” Burgess is a rising American playwright and screenwriter whose work has been produced across the United States, including at Manhattan Theatre Club, Geffen Playhouse, Portland Stage Company, and the Contemporary American Theatre Festival. Directed by Robert Benedetti and performed by Karen Ryan and Baby True, The Niceties is running in repertory wtih David Mamet’s Oleanna.