The Niceties is about Zoe, a Black student at an elite liberal arts college, and Janine, her renowned history professor, who is White. The two meet in Janine’s office to discuss Zoe’s paper about slavery’s effect on the American Revolution. What begins as a polite clash in perspectives explodes into an urgent debate about race, history, and power.

The play was originally developed at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, in 2017. Peter Marks of the Washington Post called it “one of the best plays I’ve seen about who gets to tell the story of America, and how.” When The Niceties had its world premiere at Huntington Theatre Company, the Boston Globe wrote “Burgess generates a verbal whirlwind with a words-per-minute velocity that rivals Aaron Sorkin.”

Perisphere Theater produces plays that explore the notion of history, focusing especially on the events, people, and points of view that have often been left out of history's retelling.