McCarter Theatre Center presents Eleanor Burgess’s ‘The Niceties’

“America is an engine of racial oppression,” Zoe counters. As a black millennial, she has no patience for a romanticized origin story. In a thrilling exploration of academic politics across a generational and racial divide, playwright Eleanor Burgess suggests that both women are right — and both are equally shortsighted.

A tense office hour

The show, a co-production at McCarter with Manhattan Theatre Club and Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company, unfolds over the course of a tense office hour. (Cameron Anderson furnishes a precise academic-study set, overflowing with books.) Zoe (Jordan Boatman), a student in a class on the history of revolution, posits a controversial theory: the relative ease with which the American revolutionists dispatched their colonial oppressors would not have been possible without slave labor. Janine (Lisa Banes), a scholar of revolution, finds her logic flawed.

Much of the play’s taut first act functions as a sustained tango between the two women, who limn a feeling of exasperation with grudging mutual respect. Janine recognizes Zoe’s talent and spark, but she approaches it from a patriarchal and overly pedantic position. She feels compelled to remind her charge that teacher knows best.

Steeped in protest culture, Zoe reminds Janine that history is a constructed narrative — one that has deliberately excluded certain voices. When Janine balks at the lack of available primary sources to support her argument, Zoe goes for the jugular: “That piece of paper doesn’t exist, but I know that’s what happened.”

The in-between

The strength in Burgess’s play lies in her refusal to turn the disagreeing worldviews espoused by her characters into simplified me-versus-you ideological camps. In that sense, it differs entirely from its most obvious analog: Oleanna, David Mamet’s prolonged whine about the ruinous effects of ambitious, idealistic students on their teachers. Burgess has no interest in digging her heels into any particular position and planting a flag of certitude — she understands that good theater, like most of the issues of life, exists in the murky in-between.

This doesn’t mean the play is flawless. Like most works dealing with hot-button issues, the drama occasionally turns glib, causing some of the dialogue to sputter out like a pre-hashed sound bite. Burgess overstates Janine’s neoliberalism and Zoe’s political naiveté when necessary. A predictable turn toward media sensationalism in the second act seems overly obvious — the only time the play flirts with stereotypical representations of tone-deaf academics and virtue-signaling students.

Director Kimberly Senior keeps tension building through the more facile moments. She benefits from a host of spot-on technical elements, like D.M. Wood’s brash lighting and Elisheba Ittoop’s sound design, which mixes 60s-era protest songs with the politically engaged music of today.

In real time at Princeton

But the production has no greater asset than its actors, who burrow deep beneath the skin of their complicated characters. Banes presents Janine as someone who hasn’t realized she’s now a part of the old guard, clinging to an entrenched perspective. A woman in a male-dominated field, she learned to toughen up and act like a man to get ahead. To her, when younger women like Zoe reject the need to kowtow to authority and subjugate themselves, it feels less like progress than betrayal.

A recent graduate of the North Carolina School of the Arts, Boatman makes a sensational professional stage debut, showing layers of insecurity and vulnerability beneath Zoe’s outwardly assured façade. (A second-act speech about living up to her parents’ middle-class expectations is heartbreaking.) Yet even at her most unguarded, she remains a formidable match for any opponent.

The Niceties asks necessary questions about the roles of race, gender, class, and opportunity in the contemporary academic system. Watching the play a stone’s throw from Princeton University — exactly the kind of institution it depicts — adds another level of resonance. Surely parallel conversations to the one happening onstage are occurring in real time between teachers and students in offices across the campus.