What Should a Human Be?: Eleanor Burgess and The Niceties

Today I am joined by playwright Eleanor Burgess for a conversation on her hit play The Niceties. The Niceties is everywhere this season—I just saw it last week in Milwaukee, but you can also find it in other major cities across the US and in London—and it is chock full of things to discuss.

For anyone new to Burgess and her work, she grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, studied history at Yale College, and has her M.F.A in Dramatic Writing from NYU. Her other plays include Chill, Start Down, These Dying Generations, and Mocha, and she is also writing for HBO’s upcoming Perry Mason. But today we’ll be talking about The Niceties, and if you don’t know the play, that’s okay. We won’t really be talking about the play itself (which is better left unspoiled anyway), but about the subjects it covers, like race, history, and American progress—as well as the tremendous uncertainty that exists in any conversation on deep moral subjects like these.

The Niceties tells a story about a white history professor meeting with an African American student at an unnamed prestigious university. As the professor challenges the conclusions of a paper the student has written, the women are soon swept up in an intense debate rooted in their vastly different perspectives on American history. I won’t give away more about it than that, but I will say that it is such an accessible, yet excitingly intellectual play that I actually found it a bit trickier than usual to form interview questions on it. It’s not that doesn’t invite questions, but rather, it poses so many, and digs so directly into them, it was hard to know to begin without simply summarizing much of the play in the process. What we ended up with was a discussion focused on questions more than answers, and the importance of humility and understanding in a culture that so often prioritizes the loudest, most uncompromising voices. If you’re feeling the fatigue of living in a country with a very polarized and often combative political climate, I think Burgess’s openness and hope for more understanding will resonate with you. Is incremental progress something to celebrate or reject? Is the story of America one of great achievements or great injustices? And for a new parent like Burgess, how do you raise a child in such a morally complex world? We don’t have all the answers, but Burgess serves as an excellent guide through these conundrums of American life.

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