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This Is America, In "The Niceties"

Lucy Gellman | November 8th, 2024

This Is America, In

Bregamos Community Theater  |  Collective Consciousness Theatre  |  Culture & Community  |  Arts & Culture  |  Arts & Anti-racism

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Kendal Driffin and Susan Kulp in The Niceties. The show runs through CCT at Bregamos Community Theater, 491 Blatchley Ave., through Nov. 24.

Dr. Janine Bosko arches her back over a heavy book, her eyes dreamy as she sets the scene for her student, Zoe. In one world, it is 1775, and George Washington is set to appear before the Continental Congress. He knows it's a job interview, American Revolution style, and wears his military uniform to show how credentialed he is. In another, it's early 2016, and Black women are tired of keeping it together. Zoe Reed is one of them.      

“I would give anything to be in that room,” Bosko says with a rapturous look. For a moment, it’s hard to remember where she is in time, and it's clear that Zoe is uncomfortable. “Wouldn’t you?” 

That growing discomfort sits at the heart of The Niceties, written by Eleanor Burgess and running at Collective Consciousness Theatre from Nov. 7 to 24. Set in a single room on an elite Northeastern university campus in 2016, the play pulls apart a delicate, throbbing and increasingly urgent conversation about race, racism, institutional power and historical trauma, raising questions that are as pressing now as they were eight years ago.

Performances take place Thursdays through Saturdays (and on the final weekend, Sunday as well) at Bregamos Community Theater at 491 Blatchley Ave. CCT made the move for accessibility purposes; tickets and more information are available here.

"This was an interesting challenge, just to have two people in a room, trying to figure it out," said director Jenny Nelson, who is also CCT's Associate Artistic Director. "The play is really asking this question, are we approaching and exploring the whole story when we talk about history? How do we tell that story? How do we move the needle?"

As it opens in a neat university office, The Niceties asks that over and over again, turning the question into a rhetorical and intellectual battering ram. In this world, college junior Zoe Reed (Kendall Driffin) has come to her history professor Janine Bosko (Susan Kulp) for feedback on a term paper. Zoe is Black; her professor is white, a racial dynamic that is very real in not only higher education but also much of the New Haven Public Schools system.

The two are initially friendly, almost conspiratorial: they joke about vocabulary words, clean up grammatical mistakes, share a sprinkling of details about their personal lives. Bosko mentions her son, who is also a student; Zoe notes her overachieving only child status. Their laughter is polite, girlish; they clearly admire each other. Around them, the room is cozy, with framed art, a kettle and tea station, and bookcases packed with centuries of knowledge (a nod to scenic designer David Sepulveda, who has created a perfect container for their discussion).

But as Bosko challenges Zoe's thesis—that the American Revolution was made possible by the existence of slavery—something starts to shift. At first, it's almost imperceptible: Bosko charges ahead with her critique, pulling examples from her favorite scholars that range from George Washington's military prowess to nineteenth-century genocide in Pakistan. She's firm, but also gentle, making it clear how deeply she believes in Zoe's work. She suggests colleagues who can help, offering to make some calls to get Zoe the primary sources she needs.

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Zoe (props to Driffin here, whose eyes can communicate oceans of rage and hurt) isn't having it. She feels like she’s put in the work. She has other pressing engagements on campus, including protests of Howard Stern and Sandra Day O'Connor with her cross-cultural student group. She doesn't want to hear that her argument, based on a lecture that Bosko herself gave, is "fundamentally unsound." And she's emotionally exhausted from having to justify her existence as a Black student on campus.

These, of course, are also Bosko's blind slots: she stumbles at allegations of racism, defaults to old (read: white, male, hetero) approaches to history and praxis, gets defensive when Zoe doesn't acquiesce, even while praising her sticktoitiveness. She’s not entirely wrong in her critique; she’s just not right, either. So when Zoe chooses to record and share part of their conversation, the central debate becomes so much more than her thesis statement.

On Bregamos' intimate stage, The Niceties meets the moment, and then some. Driffin hits every note as Zoe, making the swerve from scholarly to righteous to devastated in moments, sometimes living at the intersection of all three. She has a keen sense of Zoe’s youth, equally pugnacious and headstrong, with an urge to people-please that comes out when it’s least expected. Even when she isn't speaking—and this is a play that relies on dialogue—she's communicating with the audience, so expressively that she keeps people on their toes.

Across from her, Kulp nails Janine, mining the character for a depth and chilly, razor-sharp edge that lend her all sorts of layers. In another world, Janine could be a straight up Karen or a boomer, but something much more complicated and interesting is happening here. She believes that Black Lives Matter, as long as they don't interfere with her lesson plans. She'll challenge the school's investment in the prison industrial complex, but not if it costs her tenure. She wants to see change at the school, but not at the pace her students can dream it up. She doesn’t think about what it means to frame an image of Emiliano Zapata or the Arab Spring, or that her collection of Twinings Tea is like a polite billboard for colonialism.

Is she a water cooler variety of liberal, the kind that went out to brunch after Joe Biden was elected four years ago? The audience can only guess that much: they don't get to see what a Trump presidency does to her. Kulp, meanwhile, sticks the landing, delivering lines like “You are a very young person with a lot to learn” and "I’m not going to validate you. You’re not a parking ticket" with exactly the right amount of cringe.

The result is a play that feels biting and intimate, with writing from Burgess that is as sharp as it is propulsive. When Zoe and Janine argue, their battle of wits and words is genuinely hard to look away from, and hard to listen to at the same time. Neither of them, it seems, is completely right or wrong: both use words to wound and to walk it back. Instead, Burgess is asking viewers—especially white viewers—to bear witness and to ask themselves who of these characters they might be. It's on the audience to rise to the challenge. 

It's also a reminder of how white supremacy and whiteness itself hurts everyone, including white people. Janine reveals at one point that she is also a lesbian and a mother, which in both academia and America (even pre-Dobbs America) are strikes against her. She's anglicized her name—Yanina—as a way to make herself more palatable. But she distances herself from any mention of her woman-ness or her queerness, claiming that they are not relevant to her scholarship.

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And yet, as Zoe rightly points out, she's the one carrying power and a privilege when she walks into a room. She has used her whiteness as a shield and a bargaining chip, the step up on which she is able to get ahead and stay afloat in her field. In return, she has sublimated the parts of herself that are most central to who she is as a human being. She has lost the empathy and drive for progress that is essential to the very revolutions she teaches her students about.

In this sense, The Niceties is a reminder to question everything, including and perhaps most importantly the systems of power to which we subscribe (government, houses of worship, businesses, institutions of higher education). As Zoe points out, Dr. Bosko is starry-eyed about the American experiment because she can afford to be: she's the grandchild of immigrants in a country built by stolen people on stolen land. Before she was Polish, she was still white.

At Bregamos, it’s also a reminder of how long and not long at all the past eight years have been. In early 2016, the U.S. watched as Donald J. Trump made his first bid for the U.S. presidency. That summer, the Black Lives Matter movement experienced exponential growth nationally, including in New Haven. On college campuses, students pushed for their administrations to create campuses that were more welcoming to students of color. It felt, not unlike 2020 and perhaps this fall, like a moment of national reckoning.

New Haven was never exempt from that (that the show is set at an Ivy-esque university makes sense: Burgess graduated from Yale in 2007). At Yale, the first half of 2016 saw the resignation of Yale professor Nicholas Christakis from the head of Silliman College, a decision that followed months of student-led protests demanding a safer and more welcoming environment for students of color at the school.

The following February—just a month after Trump was inaugurated—Yale trustees voted to rename Calhoun College after Grace Hopper. The summer before, Yale employee Corey Menafee had smashed a stained glass panel depicting enslaved people carrying bales of cotton. All of it sparked unrest on (and beyond) the campus, carried in large part by young Black women and other students of color.    

It’s a reminder that we’ve seen this inflection point before—and that it is about to get very, very bad. In The Niceties, Trump hasn't yet been elected. Dobbs hasn't come to the U.S. Supreme Court; Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is still alive. Unite the Right is not yet a thing. And no one has heard of Covid-19.

So what does the audience do when the world is that much harder? Is a fight for Zoe’s vision—and maybe the best of Janine’s, too—possible? Is it worth it? Who gets hurt when we agree to disagree?

For Nelson, asking that question is an integral part of the show. While rehearsals started well before the 2024 election—Nelson chose the play after CCT closed Fairview last fall—performances are meant to be as much of a balm as a conversation starter, bringing people together to share a story that seems so fundamentally human, and so very American.

"Come," she said, and it was an invitation. "Let's watch this moment together. We can't give in to despair. We have a space to just be."