Reading: "The Niceties" at Shotgun Players

For a variety of personal reasons, I was not in the mood to go to the theater this week, but by the same token, it was a chance to see friends and be in the warm embrace of a show, so I decided to go to the latest installment of the Shotgun Champagne Reading Series.

As usual, the cast had very limited time to prepare. This time, three days of rehearsal instead of the usual four. Luckily, there are only two actors in the play, and it has only one set, so it's not too complex in that regard. The material, however, is complicated, so they had plenty to work on.

The Play

The reading this time around was The Niceties by Eleanor Burgess, whose work I was not familiar with. The scene is a professor's office, with an undergraduate student coming to office hours to discuss a draft of a History paper. Sounds thrilling, no?

We start with some nitpicking about punctuation and grammar and parallelism and some little cutesy bits about words we like and why, etc. But then the discussion turns to the substance of the paper, and things rather quickly unravel. The professor takes issue with the thesis of the paper and the types of evidence used to support it, and things spiral into a discussion of racism and privilege and micro-aggressions and the whole gamut of topics that, depending on your perspective, fall under either the category of Social Justice or Political Correctness.

Ultimately the topic under discussion, though, is power: who has it, why, and how do they exercise it? In the give and take of the struggle over the paper, the legitimacy of academia, the university, tenure, professorship, grading, and academic disciplines all come under the microscope. So do personal goals and security, ethics, and basic questions about the purposes of life, education, and career. It's a big grab.

So clearly this play is ambitious. In many ways it's up to the task. There are some very clever passages and exchanges on both sides of the dialogue. But it's also, particularly in the first act, rather long, repetitive, and more of a rant than a discussion. The student, particularly, seems to have a lot of awfully well-rehearsed responses to just about everything the professor says, making it all feel like kind of a set-up, which is quite at odds with the way the relationship presents at the outset. If the student is so tuned in to all the issues as we come to see, then it's rather implausible that she stumbled into the situation in the first place.

But these are matters that could be addressed with some solid editing.

The Reading

First off, terrific casting. Zoe, the student, is played by Leigh Rondon-Davis, who passes easily for an undergrad, though she kind of slipped out of her teenage naivete rather too soon and too rapidly. With more time to rehearse, I think Zoe could have modulated her tone a bit more at times, adding to the give-and-take of the dialogue. Veteran actor Anne Darragh portrayed Janine, the professor. with a mixture of studied disdain, genuine befuddlement, and exasperation. She also seemed a little unclear which character she ultimately wanted to play, as her early presentation is a little dotty, suggesting that either she is already uncomfortable about the encounter (which doesn't seem right for the script) or not quite the academic powerhouse she later claims to be. Again, that just seems to be a product of short rehearsal schedules, but it makes it a little tougher for the audience to get its bearings in the melee.

Under the direction of Lisa Marie Rollins, the overall play unfolds at a good clip. The small office on the mostly open stage feels constraining, forcing the characters to persist; there's nowhere else to go. So when they do get up to move, it's pretty effective. At over two hours in length (with an intermission), the play feels a little long, but again, that's more about the length of some of the rants, rather than the setting. The office just always seems plausible.

Bottom Line

I can't quite decide whether the play is just trying to do too much all at once, or whether a more practiced, nuanced production would be able to pick out the different threads and make them more discernible. The dialogue certainly hits on lots of timely issues, but in fact tries just a bit to hard to pin down the exact moment in time, which doesn't seem necessary. It really doesn't matter whether it's 2016 or 2017, for example, but a few bits of dialogue seem to rather gratuitously pin it on one side of the 2016 presidential election.

There are also just a few too many shortcuts taken in the script. Janine, particularly, seems to let several really questionable points just go by with assertions by Zoe that just seem entirely unfounded, and that doesn't do justice to either side. A play that is essentially a dialogue like this needs to be scrupulously fair to both parties, and it feels like this script needs a bit more work in that regard.

But ultimately it's a truly interesting effort, and probably merits more work and another look. I'm sure a lot of the elements of the play would be more clearly portrayed in a full production, and some work on the script could make it truly excellent, rather than merely provocative.

But as usual, a really interesting evening from a Shotgun staged reading.