The Niceties

Zoe, a Black student, meets with Janine, her White history professor, to discuss Zoe’s paper for a class on revolutions. What begins as a polite clash in perspectives explodes into an urgent debate about race, history, and power. The meeting itself becomes a microcosm of famous world revolutions.

Eleanor Burgess’s The Niceties was originally developed at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, in 2017. Peter Marks of the Washington Post called it “one of the best plays I’ve seen about who gets to tell the story of America and how.” When The Niceties had its world premiere at Huntington Theatre Company, the Boston Globe wrote “Burgess generates a verbal whirlwind with a words-per-minute velocity that rivals Aaron Sorkin.”