Who Do You Think You Are? Here’s Why You Should See ‘The Niceties’ at CRT

“The Niceties” opens tonight at City Repertory Theatre with a 7:30 performance, running through Sunday (the Sunday show is sold out.) 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite B207, Palm Coast. Tickets are $25 adults and $15 students, available online at crtpalmcoast.com or by calling 386-585-9415. See Rock de Yampert’s preview here. A forum, in which the actors, director and FlaglerLive editor Pierre Tristam will discuss the issues and ideas evoked by the play, will be held immediately following the Saturday, Feb. 22 performance.

Since its founding in 2011 City Repertory Theater in Palm Coast has specialized in plays that smuggle us out of our comfort zones–not an easy thing to do in a city zoned for smugness. CRT’s themes are uninhibited, performances sometimes brutally so. But the productions’ stellar quality gives shock and awe a whole new definition: we’re seduced by awe, and by the time we recover from the shock, we’re glad to have gone because we see with new eyes. 

The Niceties by Eleanor Burgess is one of those plays. It’s familiar to our ideologically poisoned times, raising questions about what books should be taught, how they should be taught, by whom, and whether there is such a thing as objective truth. It subverts assumptions about American history, Black history especially, generational divides, and what power is made of, starting with those who write history: it’s almost always the winners. It will make you angry only if you’re not honest with yourself as it subverts your own assumptions about who you think you are. 




We can all use a bit–a lot–of that these days. So I hope you’ll see the play for yourself. (I’m going by the written text of the play here. I haven’t yet seen it at CRT.) I also hope CRT Director John Sbordone adds a few performances, because he’s selling out the four on offer this weekend. The play is that urgent, and allowing just 200 people to see it risks playing into the very privilege The Niceties eviscerates. 

There are just two characters and two scenes. Janine is a 60ish white lesbian professor of history at an elite university in the Northeast (Burgess went to Yale and NYU). She uses an ergonomic chair, plasters her office walls with posters of Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, the Polish Solidarity leader, and a portrait of George Washington, among others. She uses words like “plethora” and “ineffable,” and phrases like “the spirituality is–jubilant.” She probably orgasms at All Things Considered. (Who am I to judge? I’m about to use the word dichotomy.) 

Janine fetishizes her erudition by plucking quotes out of her wall of Wonderbread-white books (“Look. Adams says it right here. In a letter to Abigail”) and she’s a stickler for historical accuracy (except for when the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage). She teaches a course on the American Revolution. She doesn’t seem to realize that her white-centered approach is outdated, or that she is a closet bigot. 




Zoe does. She is one of Janine’s students, 20, Black, and a poli-sci major: she knows politics way better than history. The entire first act is about Janine and Zoe going over a draft of Zoe’s paper on the causes of the American Revolution. Zoe’s thesis is that the country had a well-behaved revolution that didn’t make any difference to enslaved people, the only people who really suffered and the only people who could have given the country the radical revolution it needed. Who should have made that radical revolution, in Zoe’s view. The revolution awaits.

Like most 20 year-old-students, Zoe is so full of herself that she thinks her version of history is correct, everyone else’s is wrong, and she doesn’t have to prove it. “There won’t be proof like that for a thesis like this,” she tells her professor. No need to look up what this or that slave or Black person thought. “I have empathy and experiences, and I can tell how they must have felt.” So theorizing it is enough, especially when people who couldn’t write didn’t leave evidence behind for historians to dig up. 

She’s wrong, of course. To first write history you must decontaminate as much as possible from presentism, the habit of interpreting the past through your own current and personal references. Social media, where pre-history is anything older than an hour, is a magma of presentism. (Zoe obsessively checks her phone during her conference with Janine.)




Even those marginalized voices left a ton behind, and wonderful historians and others have been digging up those voices for the past half century (and longer, when you include WEB DuBois’ groundbreaking work on Reconstruction), when the top-down approach to history lost its place. But how would Zoe know that from her bratty echo-chamber of a cocoon? 

She wants these rich, privileged students like her to “survive” their days at this $65,000-a-year university “without reminders of discomfort.” She wants her classroom to be a safe space which–intellectually, anyway–is the last thing it should be. “In all my classes, I marked the things I shouldn’t have to hear,” this stupid princess says. “It’s a little way to process it so I can move on.” She has the foresight to be vindictive but not the maturity to recognize that her education depends on those very ideas she thinks she shouldn’t hear. 

Janine and Zoe mostly discuss, then debate, then argue, then fight at cross purposes, their disagreements devolving into pitiless and pitiful behavior that does neither credit even as each makes excellent points. This is where we are today, a dichotomy (there it is!) everyone is familiar with. These two could easily work things out if their every thought wasn’t corrupted by ideology and their every move by self-interest. They bring out the worst in each other, as ideology usually does. Then they go further down the rabbit hole. 

In an anthem to millennial privilege, Zoe thinks it’s perfectly fine to demand a high grade for her paper while refusing to do the work necessary to earn it because she’s too busy protesting social injustice all over the place. She is ridiculously entitled yet revolution-minded–in the sense of overturning the white patriarchy–even as she sips her coffee from a Starbucks cup.  (Burgess is full of details that belie her characters’ certainties as much as ours.) 




She thinks her teacher’s methods are racist but is herself oblivious to her own racism: “You get white ideas, so you are not qualified to critique my thinking,” she tells Janine. “I believe that it would be to the benefit of this college and this country if American history were taught by a person of color.” This is not unusual thinking since the late 1980s, when academics perverting the great gains of diversity were making the same point and Spike Lee was claiming that only Blacks should make movies about Blacks. Does that mean Blacks should not teach European art history, Japanese history or the Holocaust? That Edward Said, a Palestinian, should never have taught comparative literature and Cornel West, a Black philosopher, has no business lecturing us about Kant and Locke? That Janine should have stuck to teaching about the mill girls of Lowell and Seneca Falls? 

Zoe doesn’t think that far. To her, “someone else can be better,” she tells her teacher from the comforts of her ignorance. “That’s why I want you out of the way.” By then she is sounding exactly like DeSantis henchmen Richard Corcoran and Chris Ruffo, who have purged New College of its woke faculty and replaced it with party-line slaves. The Niceties, ironically, would be banned in Florida’s middle and high schools and would be barbed-wired in trigger-warnings in colleges and universities except at New College, where it would be kindling for the nightly bonfire of titles on the DeSantis index. 

Burgess wrote the play’s first draft during the 2016 campaign, and completed the second act after Trump won that November, which informs a lot of Zoe’s almost violently revolutionary desires. Burgess also did something remarkable: with The Niceties, she anticipated by three years the very same debate that surrounded The 1619 Project and its banning from Florida and other schools, because 1619 upends assumptions about American history and slavery’s central role in it–with some inaccuracies of its own, but not the kind that warrant its banning.




It’s one of the plays’ big flaws that Burgess drops the whole argument about historical accuracy, about which there ought to be no compromise. She has Janine abjectly capitulating to Zoe at every turn, agreeing with her that she really has taught the wrong way and ought to do better. It’s a necessary, manipulative plot twist to get the playwright’s points across: Truth loses. Ideology wins. 

As a result I think the second half of the book is much weaker than the first because it devolves into near-parodies of the characters. Structurally, the characters recede, and Burgess’ preaching takes center stage. It’s heavy-handed (and excusable in a rookie playwright), but accurate: liberals who should be champions of truth and open minds have adopted the McCarthyist playbook and what Hawthorne, referring to New England’s Puritans, called he “persecuting spirit.” 

Zoe starts secretly recording Janine to use the evidence against her. She demands, as in a Pol Pot reeducation camp, that Janine call herself a “racist,” and eventually demands her resignation. Janine herself pretends all along to seek compromise when all she’s doing is abandoning her own ethics, playing for time and saving her skin, ending with an unmasking of her own indefensible violations when she blackmails Zoe with Zoe’s supposed history of mental health problems and when she calls Zoe and her ilk “savages.”   




Put simply, these two characters who first try to outwoke each other then out-vile each other are exactly why people who think of themselves as liberals handed Trump his first presidency and, instead of learning from it, doubled down on pieties and intolerance for anyone not like them, and handed him his second presidency, this time on a silver platter. 

“The thing is, Zoe,” Janine tells her in one of the sharper insights of the play. “If you make it too difficult to be a good person, you all of a sudden make people strangely comfortable with being a bad person.” 

That’s where we are as a nation. That’s why Zoe would have voted for Trump this second time around–not because she believes in him, but because, just as the Marxist dialectic required  bourgeois democracies as a necessary step to the communist ideal, Zoe thinks Trumpism a necessary step on the way to the Black revolution. It’s that kind of thinking that has Zoe speak one of the vilest lines: “You know I am actually enjoying the opiate crisis. I like it that white people are having trouble with drug addiction. I want them to know how it feels.”  

There comes a point when you can’t wait for the curtain to fall on these two. 




The playwright chose for an epigraph to her Niceties what Learned Hand, the great jurist, wrote in Morals in Public Life (1951) and told a congressional subcommittee the same year: “I should like to have that written over the portals of every church, every school, and every courthouse, and, may I say, of every legislative body in the United States. I should like to have every court begin, ‘I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that we may be mistaken.’”

The epigraph is usually attributed only to Hand. But the quote within the quote is by Oliver Cromwell, the brutish English dictator of the 17th century who was often mistaken and was often a paradox, preaching that familiar brand of liberty that applies only to his kind. He beheaded opponents and silenced the rest in a delirium of zealotry. Cromwell, not Hand, is the model for Burgess’s two characters in The Niceties. For the rest of us, he’s a lot more than a model. 

Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.

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