By Juan Ramirez, lifestyle critic
Young and old, black and white, left and far-left battle it out in “The Niceties,” Huntington Theatre Company’s season opener which had its world premiere Wednesday night. If only the battles onstage weren’t taking place all around us, in real time, in much more vital ways.
Written by Eleanor Burgess, the play begins shortly before the 2016 US presidential election. In her book-littered office, Janine (Lisa Banes), a white college professor, spends office hours debating a contentious paper about the role of slavery in American history by Zoe (Jordan Boatman), a black student in her class. Despite the professor’s flashy Democratic views — she proudly sips from the “I’m With Her” mug on her desk — Janine has built her historical outlook on the blind liberal optimism that would later be challenged by that election’s results.
For Janine, Zoe’s claim that the American Revolution wasn’t truly radical since it ignored the concerns of its black residents, is “fundamentally unsound;” if it can’t be sourced in a college textbook, she says, it cannot be. Zoe is exasperated, arguing that there will never be proper first-person accounts from the people on whom the pain was most inflicted.Their politeness unravels as the student challenges her professor’s beliefs on the country’s moral arc and its ties to a past that won’t go away.
The production billing itself as a “powder keg of race, history & power,” is a bit like Wile E. Coyote trying to detonate a bomb the much younger Road Runner has already exploded. Anyone with a finger on the pulse of current racial issues — or an active enough Twitter account — will see the same arguments clumsily reflected onstage, minus the essential element of real people expressing real opinions. Its specificity works against it, making it feel more like a well-executed museum display than a living argument, with the overly detailed story leaving little room for outside nuance or calls to action.
Despite fine work from Boatman and, especially, Banes, who revels in the effortless arrogance of a grandstanding professor, the characters swing from one extreme to the next, often in the same breath. The problem lies mostly with the character of Zoe, with whom the play is clearly asking us to sympathize, but who, illogically, cannot rise up to properly challenge her professor.
Burgess’ writing doesn’t so much grant each side its weight on the morality scale as she does alternate between one person being right, and the other despicably wrong. As soon as either person’s arguments demand nuance, they are betrayed by increasingly cartoonish characterizations. It is questionable for two eloquent academics to constantly lose their grip on their contentions as they do here. Instead of escalating ideologies, Janine and Zoe escalate unreasonable emotion — which might make for livelier theatre, but weaker arguments.
The second act, which deals with the fallout from this meeting, finds the characters attempting to place their roles in the larger-scale conversation about race in America. It is here that Burgess treads new ground, probing questions about how to properly address social justice issues within the immediacy of the Twitter era. And then, just as quickly, the discourse dissolves into an overwrought screaming match.
Kimberly Senior directs the match with a good eye for space as a definer of power relations in Cameron Anderson’s appropriately academic set. Janine’s office is bound by a sharp slant to the upward left, with whichever character currently holding the upper hand standing under the larger space, talking down to the other in their more cramped quarters. Elisheba Ittoop’s sound design is mostly relegated to ‘60s protest songs played between acts and, a bit embarrassingly, Kendrick Lamar during the final bows.
For the disconnected or uninitiated, the play will serve as a clean entryway into post-Ferguson meditations on America’s inability to properly confront its intolerance. For just about anyone else, it will prove a softened, if well-intentioned, depiction of a conversation best held outside of office hours.
Huntington Theatre Company’s “The Niceties” is in performance at Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA through Oct. 6.
