The niceties script pdf

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The Niceties

by Eleanor Burgess

Samuel French Acting Edition

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Copyright © 2019 by Eleanor Burgess All Rights Reserved

THE NICETIES is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, the British Commonwealth, including Canada, and all other countries of the Copyright Union. All rights, including professional and amateur stage productions, recitation, lecturing, public reading, motion picture, radio broadcasting, television and the rights of translation into foreign languages are strictly reserved. ISBN 978-0-573-70799-5 www.SamuelFrench.com www.SamuelFrench.co.uk

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MUSIC USE NOTE

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The world premiere of THE NICETIES was co-produced during the 2018-2019 season by the Huntington Theatre Company (Peter DuBois, Artistic Director; Michael Maso, Managing Director), Boston, Massachusetts; Manhattan Theatre Club (Lynne Meadow, Artistic Director; Barry Grove, Executive Producer), New York, New York; and McCarter Theatre Center (Emily Mann, Artistic Director/Resident Playwright; Michael S. Rosenberg, Managing Director), Princeton, New Jersey. The performances were directed by Kimberly Senior, with scenic design by Cameron Anderson, costume design by Kara Harmon, lighting design by D.M. Wood, and sound design by Elisheba Ittoop. The production stage managers were Emily F. McMullen (Boston), Libby Unsworth (New York), and Lori Lindquist (New Jersey). The cast was as follows:

JANINE BOSKO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lisa Banes ZOE REED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Jordan Boatman

THE NICETIES was originally developed at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia in July 2017 under the leadership of Ed Herendeen, Producing Director and Peggy McKowen, Associate Producing Director.

THE NICETIES was developed in part at Portland Stage Company (Anita Stewart, Executive & Artistic Director).

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CHARACTERS

JANINE BOSKO – Female, white, early sixties. A college professor. ZOE REED – Female, black, twenty. A college student.

SETTING

An elite university in the Northeast

TIME

Act One – late March 2016

Act Two – three weeks later

AUTHOR’S NOTES Both of these women can be noble. Both of them can be charming. Both of them can be petulant, snotty, arrogant, overwhelmed, and immature. Let them both be people. And resist the temptation to think of only one of them as a mouthpiece for the truth. When it comes to the facts of history, almost everything that both of the women in this play say is right.

The events and discussions in this play are deeply felt and emotionally difficult for both characters – but there is no crying in this play.

A line break within a character’s dialogue indicates a new thought or a beat.

A slash within a line signifies interrupted dialogue.

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SPECIAL THANKS Kimberly Senior.

Lisa Banes and Jordan Boatman.

Robin Wright and Margaret Ivey, Susan Knight and Alexis Aisha Green.

Megan Sandberg-Zakian.

Alexis Williams and Chris Till.

Cameron Anderson, Kara Harmon, Elisheba Ittoop, and D.M. Wood.

Ed Herendeen, Anita Stewart, Peter DuBois, Emily Mann, and Lynne Meadow.

Charles Haugland, Lisa Timmel, Todd Brian Backus, Anna Morton, Liz Rothman, Scott Kaplan,

and Elizabeth Sharpe-Levine.

Rebecca Bradshaw, Stephanie Rolland, and Stephen Kaus.

The staff of the Contemporary American Theater Festival, Portland Stage Company, the Huntington Theatre, McCarter Theatre

Center, and Manhattan Theatre Club.

The friends who have opened my eyes and challenged my thinking, and the strangers who have let this play do the same for them.

And, as always, Nick.

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I should like to have that written over the portals of every church, every school, every courthouse, and every legislative body in the United States: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, believe that you may be mistaken.”

– Learned Hand

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9

ACT ONE

(An office at an elite northeastern college. There’s a stately, antique mahogany desk. There’s a high wall of bookcases, filled with an overwhelming number of books.) (There are a few framed images from revolutionary movements: a Lech Wałęsa/ Solidarity poster; a painting of the Tennis Court Oath; a photo of Emiliano Zapata; a photo of Nelson Mandela in a Springbok uniform; maybe an image from the Arab Spring; and a portrait of George Washington.) (JANINE [early sixties, white] is behind the desk in an ergonomic chair. ZOE [twenty, black] sits in a folding chair across from her.) (They are looking over a paper. ZOE sips from a Venti Starbucks cup.)

JANINE. You’re missing a comma here. (She holds the paper out to ZOE. ZOE looks.)

ZOE. Oof. Yeah. I definitely am. JANINE.

Always proofread in hard copy. Proofreading on a computer does not work. / Excellent word choices by the way. I don’t think I’ve ever had a student use “bedeviled” in a paper before. I love that word. All the “be” words, bemuse, beguile.

ZOE. (Agreeing.) Mmm.

ZOE. Beseech. Um. Bedazzle…

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T H E N I C E T I E S10

JANINE. Beget. ZOE. Classic. Betoken. JANINE. Bemoan. Oh, I could do this all day. Focus Janine.

Next comment. Ah, here, you have – “Washington succeeded owing to his presenting himself as a leader, elite status as a plantation owner, and his ability to establish commonality.”

ZOE. Yes… JANINE.

ZOE. Oo – shoot, yeah.

Yeah, yeah –

“And to establish commonality.”

Have you heard of the idea of parallelism? / Of – matching grammatical structure – Because here you have “presenting himself as a leader” – gerund – “elite status” – noun – “his ability” – noun with possessive pronoun. Can you hear it? / Whereas if you imagine – “His ability to present himself as a leader, to project elite status, and / to establish commonality.”

JANINE. Yes – yes! There are a plethora of options, three gerunds, three nouns, but any one of them telegraphs to your reader – “You are in safe hands. This writer will not do anything truly horrible to you, like assaulting you with grammatically incompatible clauses.”

ZOE. No, totally. My English teacher made us do like 800 worksheets on it senior year I just – I wanted to get the draft in early so I could get your comments before the deadline, and to be honest I had kind of a tough weekend and I didn’t get to proofread as much as I normally would.

JANINE. Oh. Well. ZOE. Okay. So I correct all of that, and then the writing’s

good? JANINE. Well… It’s a bit more complicated. I’ve written

suggestions, but – do you have a little more time?

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11T H E N I C E T I E S

ZOE. Yeah, I mean, I want to make it as strong as possible. But I know office hours are almost over, if you –

JANINE. Oh, it’s no problem. I just turned in a draft of my new book so there’s no chance I’ll be productive. I have absolutely nothing to do until dinner with my better half at 8:30.

ZOE. Haha, well, hopefully it won’t take that long! Um, so what else is there to fix?

JANINE. Well…it could all use a bit more flair. ZOE. …Flair? JANINE. If you want to get through to a reader, you have to

make the past feel human. And real. For instance! (JANINE gets up and goes to the bookcases to hunt for a book. ZOE checks her phone.)

Have you ever been to India? ZOE. No. Never. JANINE. It’s really – it’s quite spectacular. The spirituality

is – jubilant. And who knew lentils could be delicious? You really must go sometime.

ZOE. Well I do like lentils. JANINE. You know this place has oodles of money for

travel, if it’s related to research. I had a student once who developed his entire senior thesis around getting funding to visit places where he wanted to bungee jump. He’s now a district attorney for a major American city. You’re a history major?

ZOE. Poly sci. JANINE. Ah. Well. That’s all right. And you’re a – which year

are you? ZOE. Junior. JANINE. My son is a junior! Zachary Wheeler. ZOE. Oh! He’s in my section for Modern Poetry. He’s really

smart. JANINE. I like to think so. His being a student here…it’s

been interesting. It’s forced me to see my students not

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T H E N I C E T I E S12

just as walking thesis statements but as human beings. Which is of course very disorienting. Here it is! I’m really not as informed about South Asia as I ought to be, I’m trying to bone up, and I ran into this anecdote. So, there is a province called Sindh, okay, in what is today Southern Pakistan. In 1843, Charles James Napier was sent there by the East India Company to put down a rebellion. But at the Battle of Hyderabad he conquered the whole area, and he sent a telegram – now, keep in mind, these British men, they had all been at the same fancy private schools, or rather, public schools, as the Brits put it quite ridiculously, and they all had these absurd classical educations, and anyway Napier sends a telegram back to the Colonial Office containing one word. Peccavi. As in “Quoniam peccavi ignosce pater” – Forgive me Father for I have sinned. Get it! Sinned. “I have Sindh.” / As in the province!

ZOE. Ha, yeah. That’s – pretty disturbing. JANINE. Oh, God yes, I mean he’s making a joke about

decimating a civilization. ZOE. Like – we just killed people – hilarious! JANINE. It’s awful.

Only it’s also so revealing. Armies were raised, lands ravaged, all in an attempt to impress friends from prep school. You learn a lot from a story like that.

ZOE. Yeah. Yeah, I can see that. JANINE. (Coming back with the book.) Do you like my chair?

It’s supposed to help you stretch out your cervical disks, or something like that. I have bad back pain. The result, I’m afraid, of a lifetime of scouring sources. It’s like some ghastly metaphor about the price we pay for knowledge. Don’t hunch, Zoe, when you are looking for your new, illuminating

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13T H E N I C E T I E S

evidence, never hunch. Pull the evidence up to you. What my son would call a protip. You see what I mean though?

ZOE. Yeah, it looks like a really supportive chair. JANINE. No, about – about evidence. Peccavi. That’s the

kind of story I want you to put in your paper. Or or or – here’s one of my favorites. So – 1775, fighting has broken out near Boston, and the Continental Congress meets to appoint a general for their new army. George Washington’s a top contender – he’s probably the person in the country most experienced with military command. But – colonial Americans – you’ll remember from class, they were so worried about tyranny. There had never been a country before, in human history, that managed to sustain a system where the people chose their own government.

ZOE. Right. They all ended in chaos or dictatorships. JANINE. Exactly. They’re terrified the new general will just

seize power. ZOE. The Julius Caesar thing. JANINE. Yes. Now, Washington wants the job very badly, but

he’s strategic. When he’s asked about taking command, he tells Congress: “Though I am sensible of the high honour done me, yet I feel great distress, for fear that my abilities and my experience may not be equal to the task.” But here’s the best part – he showed up to give that speech in his military uniform. So he’s basically saying, please don’t give me this job, and the whole time, he’s wearing his résumé. Can you hear it? The, the detail – the / palpable –

ZOE. Yeah. Definitely. JANINE. I think that’s an absolutely wonderful story.

To imagine those men – not knowing they would pick Washington. Struggling to figure things out. I would give anything to be in that room. Wouldn’t you?

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T H E N I C E T I E S14

ZOE. Um. Probably not. No.

JANINE. Hah. Right. (Handing over the book.)

You can borrow this, if you like. ZOE. Thank you.

(She tucks it in her purse.) JANINE. Have to give it back! Though God knows why, I’ll

never reread it, but – ZOE. Of course. So – the parallelism, the footnotes, more

flair in the evidence, and then I hand it back in? JANINE. Actually, these comments were more about writing

than argument. I like to offer very thorough comments purely on writing, for three pages. Most teachers in this gothic pile don’t see that as part of their job – to teach any practical skills. I’m glad you brought this in early. I can see you’ve done an impressive amount of work on it –

ZOE. Yeah, well. I tend to get a little intense about fulfilling requirements. Only child. Or – it’s weird that you never get to graduate from being an only child to being an only adult.

JANINE. True! I wish you hadn’t plowed ahead like this – written the full draft without getting comments on the thesis.

ZOE. I was just excited to lay out the ideas. JANINE. I’m afraid you’re in for quite a substantial rewrite.