The Niceties, now on stage at Theatre Three to open the company’s season, has a predecessor, David Mamet’s Oleanna, which is also about a confrontation between a professor and student. While Mamet took on sexual harassment in the 1990s, Eleanor Burgess’ play, set during the last year of the Obama presidency, deals with the history and legacy of slavery.
Sans Mamet’s intentionally stammering dialogue, the two dramas have striking similarities, starting with the idea that the professor, an authority figure, has the power in the relationship – and more to lose if things go wrong. Both also raise a basic question about plays that boil down to a political argument: Which side has the writer armed with more convincing evidence?
While Oleanna seems to stack the deck against the student, The Niceties does a better job of giving both Zoe (Nicole Renee Johnson) and her history teacher Janine (Krista Scott) enough ammunition to land their points. But, seen in matinee last weekend in Theatre Three’s small basement space, Theater Too, the show suffered from Scott’s shaky performance.
She didn’t have her lines memorized well enough to sustain Janine’s convictions. Frequently searching for what she was supposed to say next made the character seem less sure of herself. Zoe may have won the argument anyway, but Johnson had no such trouble, nailing her assertions that slavery marred the American Revolution, making the founders into hypocrites and leaving behind permanent racial discrimination.
Set in Janine’s dark-wood, book-lined office at a liberal arts college, a portrait of George Washington hanging from a shelf, The Niceties opens with the professor going over Zoe’s paper on the subject. The discussion remains civil for a long stretch as Janine corrects grammatical errors before turning to the paper’s lack of primary sources and then what she sees as its unfounded conclusions.
Eventually, things get heated – and physical – threatening both the professor’s career and her student’s future.
Though pleading otherwise, neither character can really see the other’s point of view because of their contrasting experiences and position in the world. Janine urges patience, citing the fact that radical revolutions have historically led to dictatorships. Zoe is sick of waiting for racial justice after all of these years.
Sasha Maya Ada, who directs, includes a startling reference to the current U.S. administration at the end of The Niceties. In this and other ways, the production can at times come off as polemical.
But it also succeeds for that very reason: Burgess’ script finds the most credible arguments on both sides, a triumph of intellectual rigor that leads to a piece of riveting theater.
Details
Through Oct. 12 at 2688 Laclede St., Suite 168. $37-$40. theatre3dallas.com.
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