Scratching the surface – Isthmus

Forward Theater Company has a knack for choosing plays that are accidentally a bit on the nose. Last year they planned on producing The Amateurs the story of a troupe of 14th century actors during the Black Plague which was canceled due to the outbreak of COVID-19. This season they chose The Niceties by Eleanor Burgess a play about people so entrenched in their opposing views that they cannot hear each others arguments across the enormous ideological crevasse that separates them. That describes this political moment in the U.S. to a tee.

Unfortunately this piece, available for streaming through Feb. 7, barely scratches the surface of the current, essential conversations that need to happen about race in this country. The weak script, uneven performances, and poor production values undercut the exchanges it would like to provoke.

The Niceties is a period drama set in 2016 on an elite college campus in Connecticut. It was originally inspired by the controversy surrounding a memo to Yale students from the administration that urged them not to don racially offensive costumes for Halloween. In response, one of the professors suggested that college kids wear what they want and talk to each other about crossing boundaries. This led to a much larger protest about institutional insensitivity to Yales BIPOC students and the playwrights observation that little actual communication resulted from the subsequent outrage.

Though it was only five years ago, it feels like decades have passed since then. Compared to the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests in response to the murder of George Floyd last summer, two hours of vitriol over issues of political correctness on a college campus seems positively quaint. And while The Niceties documents that moment, it doesnt add to the current conversation.

The biggest problem with The Niceties is that the characters are written as types who simply personify diametrically opposing views. Janice (played by Sarah Day) is a highly esteemed, white college professor at an Ivy League school, a 60-something Baby Boomer who has been insulated from reality by her position in the ivory tower. Cynical, condescending, and occasionally oblivious, she has a very practical view of how to couch unpleasant messages to those in power and affect change in a white, patriarchal society. On the other end of the spectrum is Zoe (played by an impressive Samantha Newcomb), a bright, passionate, Black 20-year-old college junior, majoring in political science. She feels it is her duty to protest injustice, foment change, and awaken the establishment to racism wherever she sees it from colonial syllabi and whitewashed history courses to micro-aggressions of mispronouncing students names. A Millennial and an idealist, she demands attention, validation, and immediate action.

To minimally complicate the characters, Zoe is from a well-heeled East Coast family and Janice is from working-class, immigrant stock. The professor is also a lesbian who has had her own struggles with lack of representation, prejudice, and legal inequality. They take turns being right, being sanctimonious, and wielding the power in the room.

Although the authors notes urge us to see the characters as equally flawed, three-dimensional people, its hard not to loathe Janice from the start, as she tosses off tone-deaf, white-privileged statements and mounts simplistic straw-man arguments. Her suspicion of any information found on the internet and instruction to Zoe that she should just go find primary sources from 18th century enslaved people to bolster her papers thesis sound ludicrous in 2016. Her bristling at using correct pronouns for her students and hurling you people at a student during office hours are equally ridiculous.

Not to be outdone, Zoes demands for change strain credulity because they are positioned as all or nothing ultimatums. At one point she tells Janice to quit her job and get out of the way so a person of color can have her post. And although she consistently accuses her professor of not listening to her, she is just as unwilling to hear things that dont square with her experience. Her own emotional truth trumps any opposing view.

In the end, both women seize opportunities for revenge instead of reconciliation, shifting our sympathies back and forth in a way that feels manipulative. Instead of developed character arcs, the play gives us two people who suffer for their actions but dont learn from them. Their very long argument ends with a final, ominous threat instead of any kind of growth or self-awareness on either side. Even as a cautionary tale, this is unsatisfying.

Under normal conditions this would be a difficult play to stage because its very talky and static except for a scuffle over a cell phone, there is no physical action prescribed in the text. In the current virtual world of playmaking, its even more problematic and proves the point that people who know how to make amazing plays dont necessarily know how to translate them to film.

The two actresses were recorded in front of green screens in their homes and directed remotely by Jen Uphoff Gray and DiMonte Henning. But the literal distance between them deflates the tension the actors are able to muster in each scene, just like it did in FTCs previous virtual play, The Lifespan of a Fact. Instead of floating heads in boxes that were used to seeing in online readings, the actors are superimposed onto an office backdrop, but its far from seamless. The performers gazes dont always match up, so at times they are not looking at each other while speaking. Theres a green fuzzy halo around the edges of bodies and props. A physical altercation between the two of them is unconvincing. Objects appear to float in space or are disproportionate to one another. And in its best moments, the actors simply sit still on two sides of a table and argue.

Further undermining the plays performance is the fact that one actress is off-book and the other one is quite obviously reading her script on the table in front of her. This prevents the scenes from flowing naturally and breaks thoughts up in artificial places. Its also not what audiences expect from a full, professional production, even in challenging times.

There are scheduled talkbacks after four more performances, and perhaps thats where audience members can have some meaningful conversations about race. But if they do, those conversations will probably be much more informed by the Black Lives Matter movement than by the presentation of this play.

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Scratching the surface - Isthmus