Soul Siren Playhouse Presents: “The Niceties” by Eleanor Burgess

Set within the walls of a prestigious Northeastern university, what starts as a routine conference between Zoe, a Black scholar, and her tenured history professor, Janine, unravels into all-out intellectual warfare over Zoe’s thesis that the American Revolution would not have been successful without slavery in America. What starts as critiques on grammatical structure spirals into judgments on historical accuracy, erasure, professional ethics, and who ultimately is allowed to set the standard for Truth.

What happens when legitimate critique and systemic bias present themselves simultaneously? How do we reconcile when the pursuit of being right becomes so entangled with race, history, institutions, and public ideology that we stop being capable of seeing one another outside the argument? It’s all in “The Niceties.”