This article was originally written for the fifth issue in the Advent 2025 semester of The Sewanee Purple and has been reproduced digitally.
Sanjana Priyonti
Junior Editor
In an unflinching start to Sewanee’s new Perspectives in Performance series, staged The Niceties by Eleanor Burgess: a fierce, intimate, and emotionally charged exploration of race, power, and privilege in the university setting.
The production placed the audience around the stage, creating a 360-degree view of the dialogue between a white history professor and her Black student.
“We wanted the audience to feel like they were part of the conversation, sometimes even complicit,” said the play’s co-director Sarah Lacy Hamilton, assistant professor of theatre and dance. “When you’re surrounded by it, you can’t look away.”
The two-person cast, Dria Brown as Zoe Reed and Anne Tromsness as Professor Janine Bosko, commanded the small space with gripping authenticity. Brown – a Black, queer art doula and creative producer – described the experience as deeply personal. “Zoe’s story has been my story,” she said. “I went to predominantly white institutions my whole life. My hope is that Black and brown students leave feeling empowered, and that others leave ready to be coconspirators in that empowerment.”
Tromsness, who also teaches acting, reflected on how the play made her reexamine her own classroom dynamics. “There’s always an uneven power dynamic between teacher and student,” she said. “This reminded me that as educators, we have the opportunity and responsibility to give power back.”
For the play’s co-director Dr. Britt Threatt, assistant professor of English and Creative Writing, The Niceties offered both an artistic and moral challenge. “It feels necessary,” she said. “It feels late.” Describing her involvement, Threatt added, “I’m grateful to be part of the process, being made to see some distortion.”
Her words echo the play’s unsettling power: The Niceties holds up a mirror to academia and asks its audience to confront what they might prefer to ignore. As Brown noted, working under Threatt’s guidance was transformative. “She’s one of the smartest women I’ve ever met,” Brown said. “She added such depth – seeing layers I hadn’t even considered. She made this play something truly alive.”
For Hamilton and Threatt, presenting this work at Sewanee, a liberal arts college much like the one depicted on stage, was no coincidence. “It’s about systemic racism in academia,” Hamilton said. “It asks who gets to speak, who gets to be heard, and how those boundaries can be broken. I hope students walk away brave enough to speak truth to power.”
Audience reactions reflected just that; people held their breath, leaned forward, and showed visible discomfort as the play demanded. “In a time when we’re told to censor ourselves,” Tromsness said, “the bravery of telling a story like this feels revolutionary.”
The Niceties inaugurated the Perspectives in Performance series, which aims to use theatre as a platform for difficult but essential conversations. The series continues in the spring with King James by Rajiv Joseph, a play exploring race, friendship, and identity through basketball and pop culture.
As Taireikca L.A., stage manager of The Niceties said, “theatre is meant to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”, the Perspectives in Performance series is already living up to that. In Threatt’s words, it feels necessary.