Power and its Discontents — 'The Niceties' models an American conversation at Portland Stage

This particular ivory tower is a wood-paneled office with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, arched windows, and — above images of Gandhi and Pancho Villa — a huge framed portrait of George Washington. It’s into this room of assured, long-standing status that Zoe (Alexis Green), a young African-American student, comes to the office hours of Janine (Susan Knight), a white professor of history. Their conversation starts politely, but soon enough they’re in a stand-off about race, power, conventions of history, and Janine’s own fitness as a professor, in Eleanor Burgess’s The Niceties. Directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian for Portland Stage, it’s a provocative two-hander, searingly performed. 

The Niceties is set in at an unnamed Ivy League school (probably Yale), during what we now know as the cusp-of-the-abyss pre-election spring of 2016. Janine begins giving feedback on Zoe’s paper with directives about commas, then says it needs more “flair,” then veers into a wide-ranging, solipsistic monologue about her own work, the dramas of the Founding Fathers, and the “humid” histories of colonial India. They’re twenty minutes in before Janine tells Zoe what she thinks of her paper’s thesis, that slavery in America prevented a second, working-class American revolution.