Arguably The Most Important American Play Of The Decade: THE NICEITIES

As unlikely as it sounds, this two woman play is a hit even though it starts with a black female taking her academic paper to her white liberal professor for a quick review before she finalizes it.  

The black student's paper is on slavery's impact on the American Revolution. To be specific, the student hypothesizes that because the poorest, most financially and socially abused part of the population (blacks) were trapped inside slavery, they were not able to wage war on the upper classes as they did in other countries where much bloodier revolutions took place. 

The white liberal women, in her 60s, thinks the American Revolution was so much less bloody than other revolutions that took place around the world because white American democracy is just so...obviously good, just, and right. 

What I've old you here only describes the first 10 minutes, maybe less. 

The thing that amazed me about this play wasn't the black woman's arguments about how white male historians and their very limited perspectives have colored everything, including history in general; how Mike Brown will be recorded in history; or police brutality, but how often I could see, understand, and sometimes agree with the liberal white woman's points at certain sections of the play --so many times-- as heinously wrong she was about history; who gets tell it; and what it takes to create effective social change in the here and now. 

It was important to me that the liberal white woman not be a completely insensitive idiot, a back drop against which the black girl student looked like a genius. This play was two intelligent people --one of them beyond arrogant in a very recognizable way to most black people --doing verbal battle

I won't tell you anymore. 

I like going to see a play without knowing a single thing about it except the premise. But I had to tell you something, so you'd know why you should go see it. 

So, if you ever hear of this play coming anywhere near you...

GO!

And if this play doesn't wind up moving from Off-Broadway to Broadway, then white America really isn't ready to even begin talking honestly about race. Because we cannot have an intelligent conversation about white racism and white supremacy for so long as white liberals think these things are located in white men (and their white southern bell, non-thinking, no agency, go-along -to-get-along wives) who live in the south and maybe a couple out in places like Idaho, Iowa, and the Dakotas.

Some white liberals will be made uncomfortable and some will think they're already "cool" enough to already understand everything the black character said-- that's what I saw in the theater.

Trumpthuglicans will say, "SHE's the racist" -- that's also what I saw in the theater.

But black folks also need to go see it too. During the intermission, it became clear to me that I wasn't the only black person who hadn't really hadn't thought of how black slaves being present in this country took so much social-financial-class pressure off poor whites living here as opposed to poor people living in other countries -- the ones who eventually forced bloody revolutions forward.  


This play also made me think of how the white rich told the white poor their skin color gave them status, made them higher level human beings than blacks -- which pacified the white poor (before the middle class really existed)-- and in a way not seen as extensively in other countries. And this is still playing out in some of the same ways today.

White supremacy has been a tool wielded with cunning expertise by the white rich to get richer since this country was founded. This too is still playing out today.

And now that I think of it, white supremacy has been successfully used to pacify white people in much the same way many white liberals see religion being used to pacify people. 

If this play gets anywhere near you. Go see it. There are so many different race, glass, gender, and age topics covered in this play, you'll be discussing it for days afterward. 

And then you'll want to see it again because you know you missed a couple of things.

THE PLAYWRIGHT: ELEANOR BURGESS

In 2015, as Eleanor Burgess watched a firestorm erupt at Yale University, her alma mater, over an e-mail urging students to avoid wearing racially or ethnically offensive Halloween costumes, the Brookline-born playwright was struck by the dysfunctional nature of the conversations she was observing online. 

The e-mail had prompted a response from a Yale professor who worried about the consequences on free speech and argued that students should navigate these questions for themselves rather than ceding control to administrators. The debate exploded into a wider discussion about how students of color felt that Yale could sometimes be a hostile place for them. 

Burgess watched conversations among her own groups of friends — on social media and in e-mail and text message threads — devolve into acrimony and recrimination... 

The blow-up prompted Burgess to write THE NICEITIES   

The two-character drama, set in the spring of 2016, centers on a black student, Zoe (Jordan Boatman), and a 60-something white female history professor, Janine (Lisa Banes), who meet to discuss Zoe’s paper about the impact of slavery on the American Revolution. 

Their discussion quickly turns from the arguments and ideas contained in Zoe’s work into an explosive confrontation about broader cultural and historical concerns involving race in America, white privilege, and power imbalances on college campuses... 

Read More: https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2018/08/23/brookline-playwright-eleanor-burgess-the-niceties-peers-into-abyss-racial-division/QFZOFXbr9lEEvKD6wHByYL/story.html

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