Is The Radical in The Room With Us? A Review of The Niceties by Collective Consciousness Theatre
A REVIEW OF THE PLAY THAT OFTEN PLACATES THE AUDIENCES THEY ARE TRYING TO INTERROGATE
Photo © Joel Callaway
Soon after the premieres in the spring of 2019 that would make him Off-Broadway’s agitator du jour, Jeremy O. Harris returned to New Haven for Yell: A Documentary of My Time Here, his senior thesis play for Yale’s School of Drama. Haunted by his faculty advisor’s efforts to shackle early drafts of Slave Play, Yell stages ivory tower white supremacy as a psychological bomb.
Sporadic acts of defecation accompany each scene alongside a spate of non sequitur soliloquies scorning the graduate school’s nebbish progressivism. “I dream of nonsense as a site for rites? unnamed? unimagined? untamed? unencumbered? unintelligible? unintelligent? undeserved? underserved? unnerving in their blinding, blistering malfeasance for all others before it,” he writes.
A kindred academic insolence arrived last month through Collective Consciousness Theatre’s production of The Niceties by Eleanor Burgess, a fellow Yale alum and one of Harris’ early playwright colleagues. Directed by Jenny Nelson, Collective Consciousness’ Associate Artistic Director, The Niceties is a two-character stand-off over an academic essay that operates metonymically: a metaphor for democracy’s state of emergency within liberal institutions during the late Obama years and the post-truth populism that followed.
Photo © Joel Callaway
Although it first opened in late 2018, the play is set in early 2016 under the shadow of Trump's ascendancy, whose name is intentionally omitted, placing The Niceties alongside other eminent dramas of racial self-exculpation from this period. Hamilton, #MeToo, Hillbilly Elegy, pussy hat feminism, Green Book—an unrivaled era of our national performance of liberal contrition.
Born butch and loyal to prefixes, professor Janine (Susan Kulp) teaches a history course about revolutions at her alma mater. Having protested to be admitted as the first female cohort into the university earned her the right to be suspicious of her millennial students’ penchant for identity politics. “I never wanted to be the ‘gay scholar,’ the ‘female scholar,’” she flaunts, “I wanted to be a ‘great scholar.’” Adorning her office’s walls are pictures of Guevara, Mandela, and Wałęsa alongside a large, gilded bald eagle underscoring a portrait of George Washington. In recounting one of her favorite anecdotes of the first president in front of the Continental Congress, her stern poise breaks: “God, I would’ve given anything to be in that room”—and she means it, with an honesty edging on vicious because it can’t be amended, its zeal begs to be satiated, like a storm that must ravage the soil before growing bountiful again.
Janine’s bond with Great Man Theory is the primary relationship in The Niceties, but what the play lacks in plot, it makes up in the volatility of her relationship with student Zoe (Kendall Driffin), who mirrors Janine’s persistence, forcing them to oscillate between hostile, conciliatory, and conspiratorial throughout the play’s entirety. Driffin presents Zoe, a Black political science junior and staunch campus activist, as both an imprudent moralist and the voice of an ascendant pedagogy that threatens Janine’s prestige by debunking the deceit of reductiveness.
In Freirean parlance, Zoe would describe her class as anti-human. When Janine bemoans the conjecture and subjectivism in Zoe’s latest thesis (“A successful American Revolution was only possible because of the existence of slavery”), Zoe affirms the moral obligation to oppose histories that marginalize minorities. At first, Zoe’s defiance sharpens Janine’s sword of glib nonchalance, but it doesn’t take much for the professor’s pugilistic impulse to give in and suddenly she’s giddy to raid her student’s “cult of fragility,” distorting their stoic squabble over methodology into personal combat. Zoe accuses the professor of harboring contempt for skeptical nonwhite students and condemns her lifelong insistence on “reading the children’s book version of American history.”
Each retort and reproach in the ensuing dispute reveals not only the fecundity of their righteousness but also the futility of their resolve. Janine is less aghast at Zoe’s revisionism than she is startled by the prospect of having become the elitist conservative she has eschewed all her life. The very basis of her moralism has insulated her from the present. She’s been living in the past. She was right; she might as well be in that room with Washington in 1775. In turn, Zoe opts to indiscriminately dismiss the ample scholarship that complicates platitudes against slavery’s mercurial history. She can’t bear to confront her disorientation and instead lets her puritanism justify her attempts at circumscribing the uncircumscribable.
Photo © Joel Callaway
Sick of having become the student of slavery, Janine gets to the point: “Get over it! It didn't happen to you!” She explains her family’s exile from communist Poland, how she anglicized her name, “and still, I read Catherine The Great and I don’t start weeping.” No wonder Zoe’s political aims become mired in egotism and retribution—it’s Janine’s sharpest lesson. Zoe publicizes their fight, which her phone had been recording all along.
Since The Niceties wishes for us to identify with and reflect through both characters, the statutes and indiscretions of both are rendered as equivalencies. We’re encouraged, in other words, to understand a tenured professor’s hero worship to be equally as callous as an undergrad’s attempt at demystifying it. The audience saw right through this. Their snark the night I attended was only ever raucous when addressed to Janine. Who would identify with the play’s only authority figure who exposes her phony altruism and presumptuous contempt within her first lines? Rather than provoke self-critique, Janine’s portrayal encourages a bourgeois audience to defer accountability.
The fraud of liberal moralist posturing is unmasked here because what is supposed to be rendered as a dichotomy between a liberal and far-leftist is so glaringly a debate between reactionary and center-right. After all, it’s unlikely that the typical Collective Consciousness Theatre audience would consider Zoe an extremist. When we first meet her, she explains that her dream is careerist anti-racism (her post-grad goal is a social justice lobbying fellowship) and, although improperly substantiated, her so-called radical thesis isn’t novel within or outside academia—it’s actually the same argument posited by the New York Times’ 1619 Project, published in 2019 to broad scholarly chagrin.
Although by the end of the play she vows to bring about America’s first “real, radical revolution,” her demands for school reform prioritize turning funds toward minority-owned businesses and more evaluations for professors who make students feel “uncomfortable.” Despite her desperate desire for transformation, Zoe’s activism actually dehistoricizes and depoliticizes power and injury by seeking to address it at the identitarian level.
Performed only two weeks after Trump had been re-elected, and in the midst of a decades-long lurch toward autocracy, it’s hard to view Zoe’s arguments as in competition with Janine’s instead of constitutive of them. Even when claiming to engage in power analysis, in fighting the good fight, in diversifying institutions, in championing representation, in demanding the appointment of minorities into commissions, in obsessing over the numbers and the names, the sources that generate racism, sexism, and other oppressions in the first place go unscathed in favor of a reactionary politics of gesture and rhetoric aimed at the symptoms and the reproaching of injuries in silos—indicative of our current-day progressive impotence and social fragmentation.
Driffin enters Act II sulking, a dim dawn glimmering in her eyes that evince defeat as much as defiance, her ire dampened by the backlash and idolatry spawned by the release of her tape. Janine, ever the self-proclaimed “expert in change,” having discovered Ta-Nehisi Coates while her classes were suspended, has a solution: a joint statement demanding action from the board of trustees, such as endowment divestment from weapon manufacturers. But when Zoe’s growing demands expose the professor’s personal complicity, Janine pleads for “realistic” moderate stances. Once again, their battle, ostensibly about intellectual censorship and workplace activism, returns to revanchist ad hominem attacks.
Photo © Joel Callaway
It’s throughout these final bouts that Zoe appears less like a mere rhetorical device for the playwright and director. Whereas typical Obama-era SJW fictions compelled the victims of racism to assuage the guilt and inferiority complex of those who benefit from this violence, Zoe refuses to play Janine’s therapist, especially after the professor, in retaliation, locates Zoe’s medical records exposing her psychiatric afflictions. Just when Zoe’s backbone was getting used to standing up she must resort to low blows, expressing her delight in the plight of white America’s opiate crisis, kneading white extinction anxiety, and demanding Janine’s resignation. “If you’re so afraid of revolutions,” she threatens, “you should’ve worked harder to make them unnecessary.” But Janine is ready for civil war: “If you make it too difficult to be a good person, you suddenly make people feel very, very comfortable being a bad person.”
If The Niceties stages deliberative democracy hoping to inject our current cultural strife with some more of it, it’s pessimistic about the language we’d use, for it's in the play’s language itself that the “left’s” powerlessness is most evident. Because so few of Janine and Zoe’s insults or corrections land any impact, deflected as freely as they are flung, the play unfolds like a two-hour-long screaming match, endowed with the acerbity of Twitter debates circa 2016, in which hopelessness and vitriol rises not for what one is being told, but for being heard less and less. (Professedly anti-Republican, Janine’s dialogue especially is an adaptation of “facts don’t care about your feelings” Twitter-speak.) All Janine and Zoe know is a political language bastardized and corrupted in the name of one unassailable truth. They are exhausted voices pleading for validation? Identity? Power? Hmm. Perhaps freedom from language itself? In one of the final moments of the play, Zoe abandons her fixation on competing survivor stories. “Publish whatever you want,” she orders Janine. “Do. Your. Worst. Because the minute you do not hold anything over me, I think that’s the minute I will finally be free.”
The fatal weakness in language is that it’s comprised of the past, a past that could be repossessed as easily as our future has been auctioned off. We are doomed, suggests The Niceties, to interpret our nation’s origin myth vis-à-vis our relationship to dominance. For all the pundit pandering across our political spectrum for justice, democracy, identity, and freedom rooted in our origins, we read the past not in search for unity but for self-advantage based on our position and wishes: it’s as advantageous for Zoe to read history as discontinuous as it is for Janine to read it inversely. Despite her moralistic gaze, Zoe’s version of history is merely a variant of Janine’s nationalist history, both flattening historical divisions within groups, and essentializing those deemed outside of them, while favoring monocausal explanations for otherwise turbulent histories. They are in opposition for being in agreement. And so, akin to much of this year’s fondest spectacles (Wicked, Brat, rap rivalries), when Janine and Zoe do talk politics they are merely politicizing their shared pathologies.
But to me The Niceties performs most like the Harris-Walz campaign during this year’s election: in their fervent pursuit to rehab liberal democracy, in their moralistic aim to hear “all sides” and seek consensus rather than vision, both placate the Right to uphold the liberal aesthetic it purports to interrogate, rather than concede to the revolutionary sentiment to which it’s ostensibly sympathetic. If this enlightened, centrist “nuance” is going to sip from the same mythohistorical elixir as the Right, if it’s going to share its drunkenness on hegemonic universality and textual privilege, what is it if not closested conservatism? This discursive stagnation that fuels The Niceties enters our moment as toothlessly as a land acknowledgement to kick off a corporate meeting. If not now, when must we get dramaturgies unbeholden to normative law and pragmatism? Where does this sort of dialogue lead us to if not right back to the status quo? Perhaps Janine was wrong: Zoe actually did come to share her conclusion that revolutions are futile. At least revolutions within liberal thought, which will remain a passive replacement for the radical change we crave. Let’s dream of nonsense instead.