Script Analysis Project

SAMUELFRENCH.COM SAMUELFRENCH.CO.UK

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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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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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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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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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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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.

Your argument is…fundamentally unsound. ZOE. Unsound?

(JANINE flips to the front of the paper.) JANINE. “A successful American Revolution was only

possible because of the existence of slavery.” ZOE. Yes.

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JANINE. Yes? ZOE. Yes.

The whole idea came out of your lecture on how most revolutions have two phases. There’s the initial, moderate revolution, led by upper-middle-class people. And they make moderate, constitutional changes. But they don’t help the people who are really suffering – they don’t do anything about…economic inequality… real injustices.

JANINE. Yes. That’s – mostly – yes. ZOE. And so new leaders with broader popular support

take over in a second, radical revolution. The moderates and the radicals can’t agree. And so revolutions usually turn into violent, drawn-out conflicts. Basically civil wars. That’s what happened in France, in Russia. In Mexico. In China with Mao overthrowing the Nationalists. That’s what you talked about in class.

JANINE. …Yes. ZOE. Is any part of that wrong? JANINE. No. ZOE. But in the U.S., the people who were really suffering,

who would have become radicals, were the slaves. And everybody else, upper-middle-class white people and poor white people, were pretty happy with the way things were. That’s why the U.S. never had a radical revolution. It stopped in the moderate phase and had one of the most unified, non-destructive revolutions of all time.

JANINE. Is this a theory that you read somewhere? Is there a book that –

ZOE. No. It’s my theory. JANINE. Because – there are a lot of prevalent theories

about why the American Revolution was so moderate. Do you remember the ones we discussed in class?

ZOE. Yes.

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JANINE. We can review them, if you like. ZOE. I don’t need to review them. JANINE. There were a lot of factors – ZOE. Revolutions tend to stay moderate when people

are fighting an outside enemy, like the British. Pre- industrial revolutions were more moderate because radicals couldn’t get their message out.

JANINE. Good, yes. There’s also my own theory, that diverse economies lead to more gradual change. / Admittedly that was my first book, I’m not very proud of the execution –

ZOE. Right.

ZOE. Yeah, I understand that, I mean I get that all of that definitely played a role.

JANINE. I should have started by saying – it’s a very interesting idea. It’s one of the more imaginative arguments I’ve seen –

ZOE. You don’t have to start with a compliment if you don’t respect my work.

JANINE. I do respect it. Don’t get me wrong – it is bold, original thinking. Reading it made me wish you’d speak up in class. But – your thesis is not an explanation that any scholars who really know the period could agree with.

ZOE. Wow. Um. You’re saying universally, everyone who’s studied the American Revolution would disagree with me.

JANINE. Well. Yes. (She waves at the bookcases.)

I’ve read what they think. They’re my colleagues. I edited their work together for your Comparative Revolutions textbook. None of them have reached the conclusion you did.

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ZOE. Like you said, it’s original. JANINE. It’s also not a good fit for the available evidence. ZOE. Yeah, I’m sure that’s the reason no one’s thought of it. JANINE. How do you mean? ZOE. Never mind.

(She decides she does want to say it.) I just think it’s – I think it’s funny – that a lot of smart, educated people don’t think that an institution affecting millions of people played / a role –

JANINE. It wasn’t millions. Technically. In this era it was more like 500,000.

ZOE. – That an institution affecting 500,000 slaves played a role in the revolution. Except it’s also maybe not surprising given who those historians are?

(Short beat as JANINE figures out what this means.)

JANINE. It’s not about who the historians are. A lot of historians have written about the role race has played in American history. There’s clear evidence that during the Civil War, wealthy Confederates used racism to get poor white support. Our modern electoral map is a drawing of who liked and who hated the Civil Rights Act. No one is questioning the role of race in American politics – One need only turn on the TV and watch these stupid Republican primary debates. I’m sorry – if you’re a Republican, of course I respect that –

ZOE. I’m not a Republican. JANINE. Oh good. Well, right? Am I right? ZOE. I actually haven’t been watching much? I can’t really

handle the fact that this is our last year with Obama. JANINE. I know.

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Well thank God they’re hopelessly divided because otherwise the situation would be dire. What I’m trying to say is that the evidence from this period doesn’t fit. You’re saying that if there hadn’t been slavery, poor whites would have pushed for radical economic change. But that doesn’t hold up. Even in colonies like New Hampshire and Massachusetts, where slaves made up less than two percent of the population, there was no serious discussion of economic reform. Unlike France, there was no famine, no crisis. Read the letters, the diary entries. This was long before Karl Marx. The idea of democracy already felt huge and exciting and terrifying to these people. More radical change just wasn’t on the table, with or without slavery.

ZOE. Well I found sources that said different. (JANINE looks over the paper, thoughtful.)

JANINE. (Reading.) “Wealthy and poor whites were unified by their interest in preserving slavery.” Where did you read that?

ZOE. It’s in my footnotes. (JANINE flips to the footnotes.)

JANINE. Www.revolutionarywar.net. You know what they’re calling your generation? I think this term is much better than “millenials,” millenials makes it sound like you’re all hopeful religious fanatics. “Digital natives.” Have you heard that?

ZOE. Yeah, somewhere. I think I saw it online. JANINE. I think it’s wonderful. I heard it at a modern

pedagogy workshop, and another professor there, for the rest of the day he kept deliberately confusing it and saying “technological savages.”

(She finds this funny, ZOE does not.) Well the trouble that I have with this info from www. revolutionarywar.net is that it’s wrong. Five states

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abolished slavery during the war. Northern delegates to the Constitutional Convention fought tooth and nail to try to end the international slave trade. Far from being unified by slavery, whites were actively fighting over it.

ZOE. Okay. Maybe. But – But you can’t say they weren’t unified – Even if they didn’t all like slavery – They were unified by not caring much about it. You said they were willing to fight over slavery at the Constitutional Convention but how much were they willing to fight? Not enough. They compromised over it. If there had been a slave revolt, they wouldn’t have supported it. They wouldn’t have risked division to support it.

JANINE. That’s almost certainly true. ZOE. Having the biggest injustice in a society all concentrated

on just twenty percent of the population made it easier for the rest of the population to agree. Why did the American Revolution go so much better than any other revolution in any other country ever? It’s easier to be pro-equality when there’s a subjugated minority in your midst.

JANINE. Well that’s a horrifying possibility. I like that you stick by your opinions. You know so many of your classmates – and, I hate to say it, but the women especially – they come in here. In their cute outfits and their faces full of makeup. And I try to push them on their thinking and they nod, and tell me that’s so interesting, or they’ll do that right away. They’re so eager to do what I tell them. When what I want, of course, is debate.

ZOE. Of course. JANINE. And then when I get it, it’s always from the men –

and who wants them to sharpen their debating skills? ZOE. Ha. Right.

There’s actually – there’s this joke –

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Where did the male debater get his water? From a well, actually…

JANINE. Oh. Ha. That’s funny. …You know I was in the third class of women here. And the men couldn’t decide whether they were allowed to argue with us. Or whether it was unchivalrous. And then if you argued with them they thought that meant you wanted to go out.

(ZOE laughs a little, thinks about this.) ZOE. That must have been pretty crazy. JANINE.

Oh it was. You know when I found out I was having a boy I thought oh no. I was sincerely worried that I would impair my son in some way. / Hold him back. Because I don’t want him to be president, or head of the history department, or CEO. I want that to be – well, you.

ZOE. No…

I wanted a daughter. I could have made her unstoppable. I change my mind. I want you to keep your thesis. But you’ll need better research.

ZOE. What exactly does that mean, better research? JANINE. The section on the white standard of living was

great, it’s very compelling. But many of the other paragraphs are – conjectures. You make huge claims about what might have motivated people. You cite – psychologists. Bloggers. But you offer no primary documents. No perspectives from people who were there about what they saw going on. You need to hit the library.

ZOE. The library.

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JANINE.

ZOE. That’s not what I –

Yes. The library. Go find some books. Big heavy books made of paper. / It’s not always that easy, you can’t always type a couple words in a box and know everything there is to know, sometimes you really have to work to get at the truth. John Adams hated Paris. You know how I know that?

ZOE. …From a book? (JANINE gets up, goes to the bookcases, looks for a book.)

I believe you – JANINE. Hmmm, I thought it was here…

(JANINE looks in the wrong place at first; it takes a while for her to find it.) (ZOE checks her phone.)

I can never tell, whether my memory is going or whether I’ve lived through so many things that it all blurs together. I’ve lent so many – aha!

(JANINE comes back with a heavy book.) (She sees ZOE on her phone.)

Well please, if I’m boring you – ZOE. No, you’re not.

(She sets her phone down.) JANINE. (Colder now, more irritated.) Look. Adams says it

right here. In a letter to Abigail. And there’s a footnote, where Hollings tells me, in case I don’t believe him, I can go find the letter, at the Massachusetts Historical Archives, and I can hold it in my own two hands, and see where Adams signed it. That’s how I know it’s true.

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ZOE. But there won’t be proof like that for a thesis like this. JANINE. Not proof you can google, no. ZOE. There won’t be proof I can hold in my hand either.

No one writes down what they’re actually feeling. Like if someone emails you tonight and says how were office hours, you’re not gonna write back, actually, this one student had some ideas about American history that made me uncomfortable –

JANINE. You haven’t made me uncomfortable – ZOE. You’re gonna write “pretty good.”

And if someone wrote a paper a hundred years from now on these office hours all they’d know is that they were “pretty good.” I’m not gonna find a diary entry where someone says, “June 10. Today I used racism to bond with the other delegates…” That piece of paper doesn’t exist. But I know that’s what happened.

JANINE. No – no – / you can’t – ZOE.

You can say what you want, but I know, I know, because I know how race affects people, I understand / how people work. I mean we don’t have a bunch of letters by a bunch of slave women saying, “Hey, I hate being raped – / sometimes I think about killing myself, or him,” but I know that’s how they felt –

JANINE. You can’t just invent –

Actually we have those letters. Read Harriet Jacobs.

JANINE. Wait a minute, were you – have you been raped? ZOE. NO! I’m saying, I am a human being, I have empathy,

and experiences, and I can tell how they must have felt. JANINE. You may be right.

You’re probably right.

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About feelings that were there. It’s possible you’re right about the effects those feelings had. But that isn’t history.

ZOE. Yes it is history. It’s a part of American history. JANINE. I don’t mean it’s not important or it’s not part of

the American story. I mean, you’re using your personal experiences to embellish on the past. That’s historical fiction. It’s not what historians do. Historians sift through evidence – documents, objects, recordings – to draw informed conclusions about the past. That is our trade. Ordinary people guess. They tell themselves stories that seem to make sense and then because they seem to make sense they believe them. “Women are naturally less intelligent than men.” “The sun goes around the earth.” “There are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” Those ideas sound convincing to some people, some people may “just know” they’re true, but when you look at the evidence, they’re false. The entire point of a university is the idea of expertise. We are people who refuse to go with our feelings, our guts. We look at the evidence. And by doing that, we drive back ignorance.

ZOE. But if you say you need evidence… You’re excluding the people who couldn’t leave evidence behind. People who couldn’t write. Anyone without money, or an education. Anyone with no possessions for historians to dig up.

JANINE. Not excluding, no. There’s archaeology. Court testimonies. The occasional stray magic letter. But some stories are easier to tell than others. It’s an unfortunate consequence of sound methodology.

ZOE. “An unfortunate consequence.”

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JANINE. Yes. A very unfortunate consequence. It’s still better than making things up.

(Beat.) ZOE. You know I remember going on field trips. When I

was little. My school was very into like, fancy activities, we went to a lot of museums. And I remember these…ten-foot-high paintings in gold frames with – kings. And gods. And soldiers. And beautiful women in big shiny dresses. I loved the dresses. I used to say I wanted to be a duchess when I grew up. And it took until I was maybe eight, or nine? To realize none of the women in the paintings looked like me. And there were like, ships. Churches. Fruit – a lot of fruit. But never the people who sewed the dresses. Or picked the fruit.

JANINE. I know. ZOE. It’s messed up! JANINE. Yes, it is. ZOE. But then – our textbook? The book you edited?

It’s the exact same thing. Soldiers, statesmen, women in big shiny dresses, and like bunches and bunches and bunches of white men. As if that’s all there was in this country.

JANINE. It’s a book about inner political workings, not a general history. But it stinks, I get it. Believe me, I hate it.

ZOE. Okay, well then change it. Hello, you have power!! Let me do the kind of history I want to do.

JANINE. I’m afraid that I can’t simply do that. Let’s say you decide to apply to graduate schools –

ZOE. I’m not going to apply to graduate schools.

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JANINE. But if you did – a good grade from me is a signal to my colleagues, this young woman has all the skills you’re looking for in a historian. But by the standards of academia, your current work is…unsophisticated.

ZOE. Unsophisticated? JANINE. You have potential. A great deal of it.

Maybe you should think about graduate school. The field could use people like you. People pushing, demanding modernization. But if you want to change how people do things – it helps if you’re the best. I have gotten to do what I want in my career, because I have worked to be twice as good as anybody else. Find the sources. Get the rock-solid evidence. Check every comma. Prove me wrong.

ZOE. So… But – It will always be harder to write a really excellent paper about black history than about white history.

JANINE. From this time period? Yes. That’s the way things are. I can’t fix that.

(ZOE takes her paper back.) ZOE. …If I made just the writing changes you suggested.

Polished sentences, added footnotes. What grade would I get?

JANINE. I can’t tell you that. It’s against university policy, and even if it weren’t… Zoe! You are a bright young woman. I don’t want you to ask, am I meeting the bare requirements? I want you to pursue excellence. I want you to ask yourself, am I doing the absolute best I could possibly do?

ZOE. I can’t rewrite my paper. That much. I can’t – get twenty pages of all new, very- difficult-to-find evidence in a week!

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JANINE. I’ll help you, there’s no need to worry. ZOE. No I don’t need help.

I mean I don’t have time. My schedule is already crazy. I used spring break to do this paper, I thought I’d already done this essay. More than / done it.

JANINE. You would be amazed what you can accomplish in six good hours of distraction-free time. What are you doing this weekend? I have a friend, who teaches African American history at Duke, I can ask her to recommend some sources.

ZOE. This weekend Sandra Day O’Connor’s speaking on campus.

JANINE. Yes I know, it’s very exciting but it should only take about two hours.

ZOE. Well I’m part of the Cross-Cultural Alliance and we’re organizing a protest.

(Beat.) JANINE. You’re protesting the first female Supreme Court

justice. ZOE. Yeah. It’s a ton of work. We’re writing up leaflets on

the real effects of her work. We’re going to be live- tweeting rebuttals to her speech and staging a walkout. It’s a lot to organize.

JANINE. Are you opposed to there being female Supreme Court justices?

ZOE. In forty-one decisions involving racial minorities, O’Connor voted against the minority all but two times.

JANINE. That can’t be right. ZOE. You’re forgetting that I know how to use google.

She voted against extra funding for minority school districts.

JANINE. Well she didn’t vote against it. She felt that it was unconstitutional.

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ZOE. She voted against redistricting to get black representatives elected.

JANINE. There are a lot of good reasons to oppose gerrymandering. She supported affirmative action! I remember this, I lived through this, she was a supporter of affirmative action.

ZOE. She supported the idea of affirmative action over and over again, but every time an actual plan came in front of her she struck it down.

JANINE. It does sound like she had a troubling record on racial issues. She had a troubling record in general. I mean Bush v. Gore. Bush v. Gore – I ask you! God, were you even alive for Bush’s election?

ZOE. Yes – JANINE. Oh thank God. But the thing is – the thing is, Zoe – ZOE. I don’t really need you to tell me the thing – JANINE. A dark spot in her record – a very dark spot – does

not negate everything she accomplished. Do you truly believe that a woman who was privy to twenty years of Supreme Court cases has nothing to teach you?

ZOE. Thank you, I know the facts about her and I will make up my own mind. I mean do you need to listen to a speech by everyone you disapprove of? Should I pull up a Dick Cheney video?

JANINE. So you’re going to be so busy protesting against female Supreme Court justices that you can’t rewrite your paper.

ZOE. That’s basically right, although it’s a deliberate mischaracterization of what I said.

JANINE. Spoken like a historian. You know I never do this. But I can offer you a one-week extension.

ZOE. Thank you. But… There’s a rally next week in Bridgeport for police reform.

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JANINE. You don’t live in Bridgeport. ZOE. That’s why it’s going to take so long, we have to get

there. And we’re doing a recruitment event the day before. And then Howard Stern is visiting campus.

JANINE. And you’re…going to see him or protesting him? ZOE. Protesting him obviously. JANINE. Ah – his jokes are offensive. ZOE. No, he supports Israel. JANINE. Okay. Well I’m going to sidestep that – whole –

thing. Look – I have to break it to you – you’re overcommitted to your extracurriculars.

ZOE. It’s not an extracurricular. It’s not, like, marching band. I don’t do this for fun.

JANINE. Well if you don’t want the extension then turn in what you have, and get the grade you get.

ZOE. I need at least a B+. JANINE. Well I need a new lumbar region, and yet I do not

have one. You have agency, Zoe. You’re making a choice about how to spend your time. Can I tell you a story?

ZOE. Look I understand your point but if you could try to understand mine –

JANINE. The summer between my freshman and sophomore year, a girlfriend and I made plans to bicycle from Paris to Amsterdam. Then I was offered a fellowship with the Smithsonian. A big opportunity, okay? But I had a feeling – now was my time. If I was ever going to be young, ridiculously young, and spontaneous, now was my time. I chose the trip. Have you ever been to Amsterdam?

ZOE. No.

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JANINE. I had one of the best months of my life there. But I paid a price for that. The point is choices have consequences. / You are choosing to spend your weekends organizing protests, instead of doing homework. That’s fine, that’s even laudable. But the consequence is, your work does not merit a good grade.

ZOE. I obviously understand that –

ZOE. Well I need one. JANINE. I did not take you for a grade grubber. ZOE. I’m not. I have a 3.84. I’m on track to be Phi Beta

Kappa. JANINE. Good for you. I made Phi Beta Kappa. I had to

make certain sacrifices to achieve it. ZOE. The Carson Fellowship for Social Justice is my dream

job for after graduation. They train you in community organizing, lobbying, communications. It’s perfect for me, and for what I want to do. But I’ve heard that they weight transcripts heavily in the evaluation process. Campus activism has taught me all the real skills I would actually need for the fellowship. But because our society buys into bullshit credentialism and signs of elitism more than actual skill, I need a high GPA to get started on my life’s work.

JANINE. Zoe – it’s not bullshit credentialism. I am telling you that you are lacking some of the real skills that go into top-quality historical work.

ZOE. But those skills are useless. JANINE. Useless?

Strangely I have found them to be of enormous use.

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ZOE. But you don’t have a normal adult human job. I just mean – you know you’re not training dozens of future historians. Everyone at this school is going into investment banking. Like, literally, everyone. They’re here for four years of parties, one semester of microeconomics and their on-campus Goldman Sachs interview.

JANINE. Well we needn’t concern ourselves with the lacrosse players.

ZOE. Come on. You have to have some thoughts about the bullshit that is a liberal arts education. A bunch of rich kids spending literally half a million dollars to get bits of random knowledge and a piece of paper they can show lazy employers who can’t spot skill, or work ethic, and just want to know, are you a half-million-dollar kid?

JANINE. It’s easy, at your age, to be cynical about education. It is. My son calls this place charm school.

ZOE. That’s actually pretty good. I might use that. JANINE. But I think you will find as you grow older an

ineffable – (ZOE is about to interrupt.)

– but very real difference between you and your less elitely educated peers. An ability to see nuance. An ability to serve the world in a way others can’t. The State Department calls me for advice about mass protests in foreign countries. I have been able to give sound, well- supported advice, because of my supposedly useless knowledge. You want skills that translate directly to a job? Go to vocational school. What we as an institution have on offer are forty-four million manuscripts and some of the best minds in the world, available to you for picking. Take advantage of that. There are others to take your place who would really welcome this opportunity.

ZOE. I earned this spot.

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Some people might want to use that spot to party, some people might use it to get ready for a PhD. I want to study ideas that I find interesting, do some good, and qualify for the job I want. And for $64,000 a year, that’s not a lot to ask. $64,000 a year that pays for your health insurance and your travel and your son’s fully-funded tuition –

JANINE. You know women fought to go here? We petitioned, we held a sit-in. We knew this place was valuable, and we fought to be a part of it, and here you are taking it for granted!

ZOE. Only it’s not valuable if you don’t understand my work. JANINE. I understand your work perfectly, it’s just flawed

work and it doesn’t deserve an A and it won’t get one. (Beat.)

ZOE. What grade do you think you deserve? JANINE. Excuse me? ZOE. Well it’s a little bizarre, isn’t it? You do something for

me, I do something for you, but you get to tell me when my work isn’t good enough and I don’t get to tell you when your work isn’t good enough?

JANINE. I’m afraid you’re not yet educated enough to tell me when my work isn’t good enough. But don’t worry, there are plenty of mechanisms for that. Tenure committees, peer-reviewed journals. Peers in general.

ZOE. Don’t you want to try to do the absolute best you could possibly do?

JANINE. Is there something you feel you’re not getting from class?

ZOE. Do you know that you consistently mispronounce several students’ names?

JANINE. I’m mispronouncing Zoe? ZOE. Not my name. Other students’ names.

Ana Maria. JANINE. Yes. Ana Maria. ZOE. No. It’s Ana Maria. And NAHsir, not NaZEER.

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JANINE. Neither of those students has ever corrected me. You know many people choose to anglicize their names.

(ZOE snorts.) It’s true. My birth name was Yanina. I changed it to Janine in the third grade. It made me feel at home.

ZOE. That’s nice, I’m happy that that worked for you. You should offer your students a choice about what works for them.

JANINE. I do, they are welcome to come talk to me about their preferences. Like adults.

ZOE. You could ask students about their pronouns. JANINE. I don’t think it’s respectful to pry. I go by whatever

pronouns a student indicates that they want to use – ZOE. Based on what? JANINE. Their name, their general appearance. ZOE. But those things don’t always align. A person could

wear dresses and want to be called a he. JANINE. Well in that case it seems to me like that person

wants to confuse people and will enjoy watching me get it wrong.

ZOE. Are you being sarcastic about your students’ lives? JANINE. No, I’m not, but I mean come on. ZOE. You come on. You have students who are vulnerable,

who may not feel as comfortable as you do in this elite environment, who are just trying to survive through their days without / reminders of discomfort.

JANINE. Trying to survive? They’re trying to survive on the mean streets of this ivory playground? Is a thousand- year-old manuscript going to fall on their head?

ZOE. They are trying to avoid emotional trauma – JANINE. Trauma? I am not torturing anyone, I am not a

war zone. Your whole generation, you have this cult of fragility, with your – your trigger warnings and your / safe spaces –

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ZOE. It’s not being fragile it’s being like – / aware – JANINE. I may be behaving sub-optimally. But when you

throw around words like survive and trauma you invite people to belittle your cause.

ZOE. Only if you are looking for ways to belittle your students. Which I think makes you unfit to be a teacher.

(Beat.) JANINE. That’s preposterous.

I am teaching you. I’m trying to advise you about your use of language.

ZOE. People don’t teach through mockery. JANINE. Well now you’re undermining the entire British

system of pedagogy. ZOE. Please. Stop. Joking. JANINE. Look, yes, all right, humor can be difficult, but my

point was – ZOE. Could you not say but for once, could you listen?

Could you try to hear, please? JANINE. I’m listening. It’s inevitable that I’m going to have

/ opinions. ZOE. That is a but – JANINE. – But I am listening.

What other suggestions do you have for me? I love critical dialogue. I’m listening.

(Beat.) ZOE. Don’t make jokes about savages. JANINE. ZOE.

…No but / – metaphorical savages, I wasn’t referring to any of the cultures historically referred to as savages, I would never do that. It was ironic, because I was talking about technologically advanced / people –

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ZOE. Maybe it would be. If you hadn’t told a delightful little story about the invasion of India. The forcible colonization of millions of people, it’s funny to you.

JANINE. No it isn’t – ZOE. And those little remarks, like, “You’re protesting the

first female Supreme Court justice?” – as if I’m stupid, as if you know so much more than me –

JANINE. I do know more than you!! ZOE. Can you hear it?

You have a contempt for your students. Particularly your students who think different from you.

JANINE. Differently. (ZOE takes a moment.)

ZOE. You use your intelligence to critique and belittle people who have less power than you. Like your comments on my paper. You think that’s helpful? To take a person who’s trying to put forward an underrepresented point of view, and to criticize them until they feel like they might as well just give up because you’ll never understand?

JANINE. I didn’t tell you to give up. I specifically told you that I thought you had a lot of potential.

ZOE. If I work harder than anyone else to please you. JANINE. To suit what good methodol– ZOE. Listen.

There is one appropriate way of responding to a woman of color who says, “I have an idea to assert,” and that is to shut up and listen. Because she has experiences you cannot possibly know, and insight you can learn from.

(Beat.) JANINE. To shut up and listen, as you so rudely put it, would

be doing you a disservice.

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If all you want to hear is that you are 100 percent right and everything you do is perfect that is not a service I provide. I have been to you exactly the teacher I would have wanted.

ZOE. But I’m not you. That’s the thing – you like white ideas, you get white ideas, so you are not qualified to critique my thinking, and in lieu of that I would like for you to hear and validate what I have to say.

JANINE. I’m not going to validate you. You’re not a parking ticket. You are a very young person with a lot to learn, including that you will never get ahead in life if you are rude and confrontational with powerful people when they’re trying to help you.

(Beat.) (ZOE gets out her phone. Seems to be engrossed by it.)

What are you doing? ZOE. I’m canceling plans with a friend for tonight. I’m not

going to be in any mood to go out. JANINE. Look, I think we should call it a day, actually. I

have some work to get done. ZOE. You said you were free until 8:30.

(She sets her phone down on the desk.) JANINE. Zoe. Greatness does not come from a supportive

environment. I have a friend, she’s one of the top cardiothoracic surgeons in the country. Do you think she got there because a doctor stood next to her during her first 100 surgeries and said – “You’re doing great”? “Your approach is really valid”? No. He – and it was a he – said, “That’s not perfect. That’s not nearly good enough.” That’s how she got better.

ZOE. How did you raise your son? Did you correct him all the time? Say, “That’s not perfect”? “That’s not nearly

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good enough”? Or did you love to listen to him express every little opinion. I want to be treated however you treated him. I want the white boy treatment.

JANINE. I certainly told him when I thought he was being wrongheaded and disrespectful.

(ZOE pulls out a spiral ring notebook with dozens of Post-its sticking out from its pages. She flips to the first Post-it.)

ZOE. “America was beyond lucky to have Washington and Jefferson as two of its first three leaders.”

JANINE. Yes… We could have had Robespierre. We could have had Lenin.

ZOE. You know you said that in a room that included at least five African Americans.

JANINE. Yes, I – yes, I see that that is unpleasant. But you know – you must know, there’s no evidence that any other leader would have succeeded in stopping slavery.

ZOE. You love them. You love them. “I would give anything to be in that room.” That’s what you said. To me. And you know all I could think, when you said that, was that if I’d been in that room it would have been as a slave.

JANINE. If I had been in that room I would have been a wife, or a servant, not a politician –

ZOE. That is not the same shut up that is not the same. JANINE. No. It’s not the same. And I apologize. ZOE. So what are you going to do about it? JANINE. Do? ZOE. Yes. JANINE. I mean, I misspoke. I misspoke. But what you

people have to understand is – ZOE. Us people?

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JANINE. No, no, I did not mean that as a race thing. You millenials. You people who have not been out in the world. What you never understand is that it is easy to pick apart all the ways a person didn’t say things quite right, and what is hard, okay, is to put something out there in the world. To pass a law, or teach a class, even to be Howard Stern and tell a dick joke, it’s challenging, you don’t do it perfectly, but at least you’re adding something to the world. Instead of complaining about it like a teenager.

ZOE. Are you going to add more black history to your curriculum?

JANINE. Well if you wait a week we’re about to start talking about Haiti.

ZOE. Are you going to talk about the lives of Washington and Jefferson’s slaves?

JANINE. It’s a course on revolutions. ZOE. So no. You’re going to ignore a fifth of Americans’

experiences with the revolution. You’re going to ignore the bad bits. I mean your whole generation. You say we’re fragile. And you’ve kept reading the children’s book version of American history your whole adult lives. Well – trigger warning – America was a land of equality for white Americans because they stole their land. And then they didn’t pay their workers. When twenty percent of the population has literally nothing, the other eighty percent gets more. That’s your land of opportunity. And that’s why that eighty percent was so unified and so happy with their moderate democratic government and so able to have the most successful, prosperous un-radical revolution of all time. Teach that. Spend your last ten lectures on that.

(Beat.)

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JANINE. It’s horrible. So much of history is horrible. “Nasty, poor, brutish and short.” Tainted with racism, sexism, classism, cruelty, exploitation, religious persecution, casual disregard for our mutual humanity. But we can’t spend all of our time focusing on that. There are other important things to say.

ZOE. For millions of Americans, slavery is the most important thing about American history.

JANINE. But…it isn’t. It isn’t!

ZOE. Please.

Democracy is the most important thing about American history. / If only because – slavery is a thing that has happened throughout human history, while the birth of constitutional democracy – that’s us. We changed the world. “All men are created equal.” Even if Jefferson didn’t think that included women, or slaves, or white men without property, still he wrote it down. And as a result, it’s something we keep, keep, keep striving towards. It’s our North Star. America is a painstaking, lengthy, but ultimately revolutionary quest for freedom.

(Beat.) (JANINE believes she’s gotten through.)

ZOE. America is an engine of racial oppression. JANINE. I feel – sad. For you. That you can’t see any of the

beauty. I understand it. But you’re missing something really wonderful.

ZOE. You know when you were dicking around backpacking in Holland, or whatever? You know what I was doing the summer between my freshman and sophomore year? That was the summer Mike Brown was shot. I was marching. Have you ever been to Ferguson? You really must go to Ferguson.

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JANINE. That’s very impressive. Look but you’d be surprised – the year when you are born makes an enormous difference in the ways you do or don’t help the world. By the time I got out of college, the Vietnam War was over. The Civil Rights marches were over. We didn’t have the internet to tell us what was happening in St. Louis. My activism has been in the workplace.

(ZOE flips to another marked page in her notebook. JANINE gets irritated.)

ZOE. “In an embarrassment of riches, America was blessed with not only Washington and Hamilton, but James Madison as well.”

JANINE. Oh, you wish we didn’t have the Bill of Rights? That’s a novel opinion.

(ZOE flips through the notebook.) Did you prepare that notebook for this meeting?

ZOE. In all my classes, I mark the things I shouldn’t have to hear. It’s a little way to process it so I can move on. I was going to send you a note, at the end of the semester. A really nice note. Saying, “Excuse me Professor Bosko, I really enjoyed your class, but you said a couple things that I found problematic, and you might want to be more thoughtful next time around.”

JANINE. Well it’s not too many things. ZOE. (Flipping to another Post-it.) “While the slave

ownership and the hypocrisy of men like Jefferson is galling to us, we do have to understand them as men of their time.”

JANINE. That’s not dismissive, that is trying to understand the past, it’s like the anecdotes – we have to understand that justice is not always obvious, that history is carried out by flawed, imperfect human beings –

ZOE. But who are you humanizing? JANINE. Everyone!

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ZOE. (Flipping to another Post-it.) “Washington commanded admiration, even adoration, from the people who knew him.”

JANINE. He did. What? He did! ZOE. Not all the people who knew him. JANINE. Oh yes, asterisk asterisk asterisk. You can’t

make an assertion today without adding four or five asterisks – you say, “Manual laborers had it rough in the nineteenth century” and you have to add, asterisk, but not all laborers had the same experience, because of race, asterisk, and of course within each race people were treated differently based on gender, asterisk, none of which is meant to suggest any sort of endorsement of the gender binary, asterisk, meanwhile let’s not forget that any discussion of manual labor is inherently ableist, asterisk asterisk asterisk. I mean none of it’s wrong, but it’s a seriously inefficient way to discuss the working conditions of nineteenth-century laborers.

ZOE. You have a picture of George Washington on your walls. You have a picture of a racist criminal on your walls / looming over me as I sit here, like this – like this constant reminder that I do not need.

JANINE. I also have a picture of Zapata – he wasn’t perfect. I have a picture of Lech Wałęsa, he was a / Catholic stooge –

ZOE. You bought that, and had it framed, and hung it up / because you have no ability to understand the perspectives of your students of color – because you have never even tried to imagine our perspectives – and that is traumatic, yes, traumatic, the constant dismissal of slavery is / traumatic, the fact that you don’t care is traumatic –

JANINE. Of course if you refuse to listen to my explanation –

I don’t dismiss –

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JANINE. Oh my god get over it!! It didn’t happen to you! Be angry at what’s going on now, be angry about Ferguson, but don’t / be angry about slavery.

ZOE. Don’t tell me what to be angry about. JANINE. My family is Polish, okay? ZOE. Good for you! JANINE. You know what was going on in Poland in the

1770s, the country was being partitioned, it was being carved up like a prize hog between Prussia, Russia and Austria, it was the start of hundreds of years of bloody, violent invasion, and repression, yet I read books about Catherine the Great, and I do not start weeping.

ZOE. Because everything turned out fine for your people. JANINE. You are a student here, okay? You have one of the

best lives of anyone in history ever. Ever. ZOE.

I need you to say it. I need you to say out loud, that first came 250 years of slavery, and then came a hundred years of segregation / and then came a deliberate and systematic attempt to exclude black people from good school districts and good jobs / and to lock them up or hunt them down for doing things white people do every day. I need you to say that whatever else it stands for, America has systematically persecuted one part of its population, in a way that has benefited you.

JANINE. Of course.

Yes.

JANINE. That is an oversimplification. ZOE. I’m so tired of remembering for both of us. This should

be a pain that we share. I have been carrying all of this around on my own. I have been carrying your share of history, as well as mine, and I need you to take your half. I can’t carry it all anymore. I will get exhausted and go crazy, I will have no joy –

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JANINE. You are making yourself crazy. With your Post-its, with your paper, with your refusal to see the good in anything, it is clearly more of a strain than you can bear. Do you think you’re the first person in history to get hurt? The grand sweep of history is that some people hurt other people and they never really make amends and you have to move on and win the next round. But you will not win the next round if you keep thinking like this. It will cost you a grade. It will cost you jobs. It will cost you political power. No one likes to feel pity. No one likes to feel guilt. No one likes anything that sounds anything like whining. Everyone is tired of hearing about racism. You are so relentlessly negative and you make everything seem uglier, why would anyone want to listen to that? I hate seeing the world through your eyes!

(ZOE picks up her phone.) By all means, rather than engaging in a serious intellectual discussion, be on your phone instead. Be a millenial.

(ZOE turns her phone to face JANINE.) That’s illegal…

ZOE. In the state of Connecticut only one of the parties participating in a conversation has to be aware that it’s being recorded. Google.

JANINE. Look, you can’t – I hope you’re still recording – when people are speaking casually, they’re not careful with every word.

(ZOE just keeps holding the phone in front of JANINE. JANINE thinks about trying to make a grab for it, but doesn’t.)

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God, I barely remember what I said. I – I helped you with your paper. I listened to your concerns about class. I didn’t say anything wrong. I didn’t say anything wrong!!

ZOE. Okay, then you won’t mind if I share what you said. JANINE. With who? Who are you planning on sending it to?

The provost? The dean? ZOE. No. No. They’d just end up like, having a meeting

with us to try to “mediate a better understanding” or whatever. No. I think no one does anything real unless there’s public pressure.

JANINE. I am not a racist. I’m not. Ask anyone who’s ever known me, I’m not.

ZOE. You’re more afraid of looking like a racist than you are of being a racist. Don’t you want to think about that?

JANINE. I care very, very deeply about equality. I care – ZOE. Okay. What are you doing to promote equality?

Are you using the money you saved on your son’s tuition to fund a scholarship for a student of color? Are you getting all your white friends together to call congressional representatives and demand criminal justice reform? Or do you actually never bother to think about racial equality, and now you’re just trying to claim that you do to save face when you know you’ve been behaving badly, because in that case you can go fuck yourself.

JANINE. What do you want? ZOE. I want this to be your problem. I have spent my life

living with this problem. Why are my teachers talking to me the way they do? Why are my friends looking at me the way they do? Why is this boy interested in me? Why isn’t this boy interested in me?

JANINE. I get it, I do –

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ZOE. No you do not. That is my whole point, you don’t get to say, enough. It keeps coming. Was I just imagining it, or did my sociology professor jump when I jogged past him in the street after dark? And will I ever really be safe if that’s the kind of thing that happens here? Here. Is there anything for me to love about my country, any way for me to look around this country with love when everything is tainted, everything, and no one else seems bothered by it, everyone else seems happy as a clam – and I have the burden of seeing it for what it really is, I have to educate people, and I have to decide when to stop educating people –

ZOE. JANINE. And just let it go in order to stay likable and employable and I have to try to focus on my dumb and problematic assignments with all this shit racing through my head, and it’s all my problem, how is that fair?? So here I am. In your office. This is your problem.

Zoe I’m sorry –

JANINE. Look, Zoe. You have made your point. We will start the conversation again and I will do better. Just – delete the recording.

ZOE. Don’t tell me what to do. JANINE. I can – I can look over the text of my lectures.

I can take another look at your paper. ZOE. That’s not really enough anymore. JANINE. So what is? What is? ZOE. Say, “I’m a racist.”

(Beat.) JANINE. The only assumptions I ever made about you were

that you were capable of great work and able to handle honest conversation.

ZOE. Your work favors people of one race more than another. That’s racism. So say it.

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JANINE. Perhaps my work has had unequal effects. ZOE. Say it. JANINE. No. ZOE. Fine, say – what was that thing? I have sinned. JANINE. Peccavi. ZOE. A little louder. JANINE. Peccavi. ZOE. Thank you. JANINE. Are you satisfied now?

Do you want to hear that I’ve learned my lesson? I’ve learned my lesson.

ZOE. I want everyone else to hear that lesson. JANINE. What does that mean “everyone else”? ZOE. I’m going to release the whole thing. JANINE. Fuck you.

Fuck you!! ZOE. I think I have enough.

(ZOE starts typing on her phone, taunting.) (JANINE lunges at her, trying to grab the phone from her hand. They grapple for it.) (ZOE shakes JANINE off just as JANINE manages to twist the phone away from her.) (JANINE thumbs through the phone, trying to find the recording.)

JANINE. Where is it. Where is it? ZOE. It’s too late. I hit send.

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ACT TWO

(The office. Mid-morning. Three weeks later.) (The portrait of Washington is no longer on display.) (JANINE bustles around tidying, making tea from a small hot water boiler. She does not walk or move quite as comfortably as she did before.) (ZOE enters. She watches JANINE for a moment, then clears her throat.)

JANINE. Hello! Welcome. Welcome. (It’s possible that she initiates the world’s most awkward hug.)

Would you like to uh – to take a seat? ZOE. I’m good. JANINE. Would you like any tea, by any chance? I was about

to have tea. ZOE. No thank you. JANINE. Oh – you know – I won’t either.

(She takes a seat.) Thank you. For coming in.

ZOE. You’re welcome. JANINE. How are you? ZOE. Um…? JANINE. I know, I know, that’s a – what a ridiculous question. ZOE. A bit, yeah.

I am keeping it together. JANINE. That’s good.

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ZOE. Oh, yeah, real good. How are you?

JANINE. I am keeping it together, as you say. This whole thing has been – quite something. If I had known how many people could be persuaded to care about a history course I would have – I thought it would be good for us to meet. Zoe I want to apologize. I’ve gone back and listened to that recording of our conversation again and again. The things I said have haunted me. I didn’t understand your feelings. And instead of trying to understand them, I tried to talk you out of them.

ZOE. Yes. JANINE. And you tried to tell me that too, and I didn’t listen.

And for all of that – I apologize. People may not always be able to agree. But we can believe that another person feels the way they say they do. And that they have reasons for feeling that way.

(Beat.) (ZOE takes a moment.)

ZOE. JANINE. You know – I really –

JANINE. I’m sorry – you go. ZOE. My friends tried to tell me not to come today.

They said you’d disappoint me again. Upset me even more.

JANINE. Well I certainly hope to prove them wrong. ZOE. I thought they would probably be right.

I guess I’m just – I’ve been feeling lost in all of this. I mean my friends have been so supportive. Most of my friends. My real friends. They tell me that I’m brave. And that I am beautiful. And strong.

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But I am not feeling any of those things. I mean it’s insane! All of this has been insane. Like, first came the nice articles. Saying it’s time we look at how we teach American history. Saying I called much-needed attention to microaggressions in academia. Calling me a hero.

JANINE. Yes. ZOE. …Did you read the one about how one of Washington’s

slaves ran away and tried to start a revolution in Sierra Leone?

JANINE. I did, yes. I thought it was a good article. ZOE. Lots of flair.

Then there were the articles I expected. Free speech yada yada. “Back in my day we weren’t so sensitive.” That kind of thing. Then came the pieces listing all the points I forgot to make. Like the one about how I didn’t mention that Latinx history is even more under-represented than black history.

JANINE. Well that article forgot Native Americans, who were much more involved in the revolution.

ZOE. And the one about how microaggressions have a disproportionate effect on poorer students and I couldn’t possibly understand their feelings.

JANINE. I didn’t think that was fair though – ZOE. No, they were right. JANINE. I didn’t know you were from Westchester,

incidentally. I’m from Tarrytown. My mother used to clean houses in your neighborhood.

ZOE. You think that proves something? (Beat.)

Then the marches. Then the articles criticizing the marches for not having a clear enough platform.

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Then the articles criticizing the criticisms of the marches. Then the blog posts criticizing the articles for paying attention to an elite school when there are so many more serious problems. And I just want to be like – I’m a person. I am a person. I am not some kind of walking manifesto you can grade. I am a person you should seek to understand. And then I thought – fuck. I know who else probably feels that way.

JANINE. I’ve been reading everything. Absolutely everything. I can’t stop myself. Even the comment threads.

ZOE. Yeah no don’t read those. JANINE. I must say, you come from a generation that doesn’t

know the difference between a hyperlink and a footnote. You’re all convinced that if you can link to someone who agrees with you you’ve proven your point.

ZOE. I saw your son’s op-ed. I didn’t think he should have written that.

JANINE. I thought you would agree with him. ZOE. Oh I do. But I think family loyalty is important.

I was raised not to criticize my parents in public. JANINE. He was raised to speak his mind. ZOE. I just –

I wanted to say that I’m sorry if this has caused problems within your family.

JANINE. I appreciate your saying that. But Zoe – I’m grateful that you did what you did. You’ve made me look at my subject and see things I never saw before. I’m planning a new chapter for my book. A comparative study of the role of minority populations in revolutions. Looking at the Kurds in Iran, Afro-Cubans under Castro. The Uighurs under Mao. And of course, African Americans.

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ZOE. Okay I don’t want to like that idea but that actually does sound like something I would read.

JANINE. I’m especially concentrating on tracking down more diverse primary sources. We always – we speak about African American history in generalities. We say life tended to be like this, or roughly sixty percent of slaves experienced that, but the letters, the testimonies, so many are from white men –

ZOE. Yeah, I – I know. JANINE. – And the result is a colossal failure of empathy. All

the science indicates that people empathize more with individuals than with groups. And what we need is –

ZOE. I really – I know all of this? I don’t need you to explain this to me.

JANINE. I’m not explaining! I know that you know it. I’m simply expressing what’s on my mind. And of course I’m not limiting my explorations to history. I’ve been reading about our contemporary situation too. Mass incarceration. Police brutality. Implicit bias. I’ve been reading a lot of Ta-Nehisi Coates.

ZOE. You should get a hat that says that. I’m not an idiot.

JANINE. (Taken aback.) Of course not. ZOE. Your tenure’s under review.

Because you verbally and physically assaulted a student. The university put out a statement saying that they understood the protesters’ concerns and that they would be examining whether your presence on campus was in the best interests of students’ academic and personal well-being.

JANINE. That’s true. I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending that isn’t part of why I wanted to speak with you.

ZOE. I think you already did. JANINE. I want to propose a joint statement.

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I say I’m grateful that you’ve made me aware of certain issues in my teaching and in the field of American History. Which is true.

ZOE. And I say…what? JANINE. Whatever you want. ZOE. Whatever I want? JANINE. You could say you’re proud that your work has

given rise to a long-overdue conversation about race on this campus. That you thank the protesters for their support, and that they should feel as if their efforts have been a huge success.

(ZOE just stares at her.) It’s not as if I’m escaping without punishment. I am suspended without pay.

ZOE. You’ll be fine. I’m sure your husband has a fancy job too.

JANINE. Wife, actually. Surprised?

ZOE. The articles just said spouse. JANINE. Well my spouse is a wife.

The habit of not talking about it is so deeply ingrained. I never wanted to be the gay scholar. Or the female scholar. I wanted to be the great scholar. I’m sorry that the best advice I knew how to give you was “toughen up.” If you can believe it, when I was coming up in this field, that was the best advice I got. And I’m still not certain it was wrong. I failed you, maybe, I was not the right teacher for you. But for many students, I have been exactly the teacher they needed. And I have ideas the world needs.

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Publication of my book has been postponed indefinitely. I have no classes. No research assistants. I’ve been gently shunted aside from my DC consulting work and replaced by a Republican moron from George Mason who wouldn’t know a coup from a garden party, so at this point my reputation is actually an issue of national security. My son is barely speaking to me.

ZOE. I’ve been getting death threats. Like, a lot of death threats, actually. Some were specific enough to make the police think they could be serious. I took an incomplete for the semester.

JANINE. Zoe. I’m so sorry that’s happening. ZOE. I wasn’t actually at the protests.

My roommates went. But I – Even before the threats, I stopped going to classes. My professors look at me like I’m a bomb that’s about to go off. I don’t really go outside anymore. Except for – once a day I walk to Walgreens. And I buy like – anything I shouldn’t. Like if they figured out a way to make chocolate-flavored Cheetos I would buy those. And I am someone who – I take such good care of my body. But now – all I want to do is sit in my room, and watch Netflix, and eat bags and bags of these disgusting things. Not just because of you. Or this. Because of – the news. This country.

JANINE. Yes. Never in my life did I think that I would be pining for Jeb Bush. Yet here we are. The Republican nominee is a – well, you know.

ZOE. Yeah. So yeah. I sit around a lot. And like, I’ve read blog posts, so I call it self care. But I ask myself what would Harriet do? What would Rosa do? What would Angela do? And I think –

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You were right. I have one of the best lives of anyone in history ever. And then I feel like a real shit for being such a weakling. And that makes me want more Netflix.

JANINE. Zoe I don’t mean to be insensitive – ZOE. That’s like, an almost certain tip-off that you’re going

to be. JANINE. Yes. But…

All of this – is another reason why this idea of a joint statement… It’s a good idea. It’s a good idea for you too. If everyone, all around the internet, heard that you and I were collaborating. It could be safer, for you. And if – I’m sure you’ve thought about this but – When you’re done with school – because I know that you will finish school. With flying colors. When you’re applying for jobs. Everyone is going to be able to google you. And see this. That you recorded someone, without them knowing. That you took that recording public. And I know why you did it! But employers are scared of that sort of thing.

ZOE. If someone can’t see the value in what I did, I don’t want to work with them.

JANINE. That’s easy to say. But it could be a hard truth to live with. But – imagine – If all the alumni, from fifty, or sixty years at this future leaders grooming ground, read about how you helped reunify a shaken institution. How an esteemed professor thinks you did more to invigorate intellectual life on this campus than any student she’s ever worked with. Which is true.

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Imagine the job offers you could get then. I still say what I always said – you’re a person of enormous potential. Position yourself to use it. It is not too late for us to help each other.

ZOE. Can I get a cup of tea actually? JANINE. Um – yes. Yes of course.

(ZOE sits still while JANINE waits on her.) ZOE. What you’re offering – or, I mean, what you’re

suggesting, right, because it’s not like a generous offer, it helps you too. That would be my father’s dream come true. He’s been furious at me. He says I’ve been careless with opportunities he fought to provide.

JANINE. He has a point. (Off ZOE’s annoyed look.) I’m not saying he has the only point! Just, he has a point.

ZOE. See I find myself with three possible paths. Path one is my parents’ path. The path you’re describing. I get the best possible degree. I get the best possible job. I make the most possible money. I show my black excellence to the world and I hope, I hope, that the world sees it. I hope they aren’t too threatened by it, and I hope I don’t get so tired of the everyday awful that I snap. Again. Path two is I could leave. I could say, I’m done with this country. I shouldn’t have to sign a statement to not receive death threats. I could just make like Josephine Baker. Move to Paris, or Brazil, or Nigeria. Publish Nigericanah. Maybe there I’ll be exotic – like, oo, that’s the American black lady. Maybe there my feelings will seem new and interesting and no one will tell me to get over anything ever again. Or path three, I could consecrate myself to the cause.

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I could sign on for a lifetime of marches. And protests. And fighting. And threats. And taking it on my own shoulders to fix the world. So I came here to choose. One, two, or three.

JANINE. Well please. Anything I can do to help you figure it out.

ZOE. Talk to me about this statement. I mean – it can’t just say, good job, you can all go home now, right? Because nothing’s really changed, right?

JANINE. No – of course not – ZOE. I mean – you were right.

I was worried about – such stupid things before. My GPA. Waving poster board at Howard Stern? I want this pain to be worth it. If I’m going to get – targeted, and blamed and threatened. I want it to be for real changes. Real, concrete changes that mean something.

JANINE. Yes – to move forward! (Beat.)

What if it said – We both agree – We both agree that for this college to remain a leader in higher education – it needs to make certain changes. It needs… It needs –

ZOE. It needs a well-funded student resource center with people of color on its staff.

JANINE. Oh. Okay. Yes.

ZOE. You sound like you don’t really agree. I’d prefer for you to be / honest –

JANINE. No! No I’m just surprised. I would have thought your concerns would be more academic.

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ZOE. I’m getting to those. JANINE. Ah. Yes. Good. ZOE. Just – there should be a building on this campus

where students can walk in and say, “I have a problem,” and someone actually qualified is there to help. There should be therapists of color, and queer therapists, and really good tutors. And better help with financial aid.

JANINE. Yes, yes, there should be. God, is there still not? There certainly wasn’t when I was here, but… Yes. Good.

(Pause.) …You know what we should really say. That we call upon the university to invest its endowment more ethically. We did this in the eighties, to try to stop apartheid. We should divest from for-profit prisons.

ZOE. Oil companies. Guns. JANINE. Banks that engage in predatory lending. Which is

all banks… ZOE. All of it. We demand that the university defund now

from all of it. And invest in minority-owned businesses instead.

(Beat.) We demand a decolonized curriculum.

JANINE. A – what? ZOE. A curriculum that doesn’t assume everybody needs to

read Beowulf. And doesn’t assume that the people who made the laws are more important than the people who suffered under them.

JANINE. What if we say, we urge the university to offer a curriculum that reflects the full breadth of human knowledge and experience?

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ZOE. That sounds vague. JANINE. It’s meant to sound inspiring.

Plus it gets you out of certain inevitable quibbles over the fact that the sort of soft-power cultural influence you’re referring to is technically more imperialism than colonialism… Technically.

ZOE. Fine. Write it. We demand that the school recruit a student body that matches the population of the United States –

JANINE. Yes. ZOE. Within five years. JANINE. That – isn’t realistic. ZOE. I don’t see why not, I mean, the kids are out there, the

school just literally has to admit them. JANINE. You’re trying to fix problems at the university level

that are better fixed in the public school system – ZOE. You can’t just wait for everything to be perfect – JANINE. It does more harm than good to admit someone to

an education they aren’t ready for – ZOE. Of course you’re afraid of it – of course you keep

trying to do less. JANINE. Zoe, what do you think is the ideal outcome from

this statement? ZOE. This campus becomes a positive place for students of

color. JANINE. Yes, and for that to happen – we need to get more

people on board. Ideally, faculty read this statement and think, “Yes. I will fight for those changes.”

ZOE. Oh, yeah, as long as the old white people like it. JANINE. Ideally other students want to help.

Ideally it becomes a model for other schools. ZOE. …Sure. Yes. JANINE. I am telling you that if you want support, you need

realistic goals.

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ZOE. Was this college totally, 100 percent ready to admit women? Was that an easy, popular, realistic goal? Did you want them to take their time?

(Beat.) JANINE. You’re right.

You’re right. Within five years.

ZOE. Then once those kids are here, we demand that the university support them. Financially, academically, emotionally.

JANINE. Yes. ZOE. We demand questions on student evaluations about

whether professors are biased or problematic. JANINE. Well…yes. ZOE. We demand clear and immediate consequences for

biased or problematic behavior. JANINE. Wait –

(Beat.) You’re describing punishments. For people who make other people feel uncomfortable.

ZOE. Yes. JANINE. The idea of evolution once made people

uncomfortable. The idea of gay rights makes many, many people uncomfortable.

ZOE. I’m talking about ideas that make vulnerable people uncomfortable.

JANINE. And who do you think is going to draw that line? ZOE. I can draw it.

I can draw it easily. JANINE. Zoe – my parents, okay? They fled Poland, because

of this sort of thing. Under the Communists. You never knew when the person you were talking to might report you for – for “wrong” thinking, and it was crippling –

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ZOE. This is not a negotiation. You shouldn’t be sitting there approving or disapproving or weighing in on what students of color need –

JANINE. I am trying to help – ZOE. You cannot help, you are not an expert, you don’t

know anything about this – JANINE. I am an expert in change, I am an expert in

university power structures, I have watched people try to change this college before – and I am telling you that many people will not be able to get on board with what you are describing –

ZOE. Fuck them for not coming on board!! Fuck them for caring more about their own needs than they do about people in pain.

JANINE. Is that what you want me to write, you want me to write, “Fuck all of you,” you think that will be persuasive?

ZOE. Fuck them for needing to be persuaded. JANINE. Zoe when you yell at people you do not change

their minds. ZOE. You do not get to dictate how I express myself. You

want to help, okay, hear me, even if you don’t like my tone, even if you think, based on your limited perspective, that I am getting something wrong, do the right thing anyways, help anyways, that is what helping looks like.

(Beat.) JANINE. Look Zoe, my movement – my people’s movement.

In my own lifetime, I have seen it succeed. Do you know how I found out lesbians existed? How I found out there was a word for what I was? I found out from a nun who was in the process of telling my class that it was something that got you sent to hell. The birth of my own identity came in the very moment when someone called my identity vile. I didn’t have a chance to take one second of happiness from the fact

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that there was a word for it! Which also meant there were more of us! That happened to me when I was fourteen years old. And this year, the Supreme Court upheld my marriage.

ZOE. That’s amazing. JANINE. But if I had given up on everyone who hurt me.

I would not currently have a single friend, or family member, or colleague. And if we had all done that, if we’d said, “Fuck you for not already caring, you need to be punished for what you think” – We would never have gotten sixty percent of the country to agree with us. It’s the reality of being gay in America. Or black in America. It’s the pain of being ten percent. You need other people on your side.

ZOE. Some people aren’t trying to win over friends. And family members. Some of us have enemies who hate us on sight. Some people don’t get to stay in a closet and come out when it looks safe.

JANINE. That only makes it more important that you be careful, and that you be strategic. Is that fair? No, no part of it’s fair, it’s not fair that you have to win over people who have hurt you, it’s not fair that you have to prove your humanity to people who get to withhold their help, and quibble, and disagree, and offend, while you’re fighting for your dignity, for your life, it’s not fair. It’s infuriating. But it works. It works it works it works it works. It works, to find language that appeals to people, it works to compromise, it works to play nice.

ZOE. I should not have to try to appeal to people who have made themselves comfortable in a white supremacist world.

JANINE. No. You shouldn’t have to.

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But you are, in the end, stuck sharing a world with them. That’s how democracy works. You need a majority on your side.

ZOE. Then maybe democracy doesn’t work. JANINE. Zoe – ZOE. I mean “be nice”? That’s your advice for me – be nice? JANINE. Not “be nice,” no, but there is a role for patience,

for tolerance. For staying in a conversation with people you disagree with.

ZOE. This is not the first time I have been asked to be nice. Or patient. This is the five-hundredth time. I was nice the first time I walked into your office. You did not show a lot of tolerance for my disagreements.

JANINE. I know. It’s true. I didn’t. ZOE.

I mean – all that I wanted was to like your class. I wanted to have the experience here that you had. I wanted to have the experience with this country that your family had. I wanted to thrive here. / That’s all I wanted. My parents were asked to be patient. Their parents were asked to be patient. Black Americans have tried being nice. We have been so god damned fucking nice and patient –

JANINE. You still can.

JANINE. And it’s working. Things are getting better. Our parents had better lives than our grandparents. We have better lives than our parents. The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

ZOE. Uh-uh. Don’t quote Martin Luther King while you try to get a black woman to shut up and be patient with the problems in her world. Don’t do that.

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JANINE. Actually Theodore Parker said that. Technically. King was quoting him. Parker was a nineteenth- century abolitionist.

ZOE. What do you think you just added to the world by saying that?

JANINE. Accuracy. I added accuracy. America is – it’s taken too long yes, it’s taken far too long, far far too long, but America is working. We just had our first black president. We’re about to have our first female president. Things are getting better. Now’s a terrible time to give up.

(Beat.) ZOE. Yeah. We have our first black president. And we’re

still getting lynched. We’ve been nice and patient for 400 years, and I’m not happy with the results. You are, clearly. You think things are good enough. Or nearly good enough. Getting there. But I’m telling you they aren’t. And I’m tired of you not seeing that. I’m tired of you not being willing to do what’s necessary. I’m tired of you trying to slow me down.

(Beat.) JANINE. You know what.

Maybe the statement should read – ZOE. Maybe it should read, we demand that within five

years, the faculty of this university match the population of the United States. And in furtherance of that goal, I, Yanina Bosko, am stepping down. Because I believe that it would be to the benefit of this college and this country if American history were taught by a person of color.

JANINE. Excuse me?

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ZOE. The thing is – I think someone else could do more with this platform. I think someone else could do more to support students of color.

JANINE. That actually isn’t most of what this job is. ZOE. I mean – let’s say I sign your statement.

Let’s say you go back to teaching. And then – what? Maybe you give an extra handout on the black experience during the revolution. Maybe, before you discuss our miraculous democracy, you talk just a little about how American opportunity was fertilized by oppression. If I’m really optimistic, maybe you even remember to give me credit for those ideas. Maybe you show up for a couple protests. I mean I don’t feel like I can count on that. But maybe you do. Even if you do all the right things. What are you really teaching? You’re teaching 100 future leaders a year, to say, “Yes, there are some horrible elements of the American past,” asterisk, “There are still things to fix,” and as long as they do that, they can go off into the world and become guilt-free corporate lawyers, or investment bankers, or senators, or artists, and send their kids guilt-free to great schools, and help them get good jobs, they don’t actually have to give up a single bit of their money or their power. Because they’re the good white people. I don’t think I can be complicit in one more generation of American leaders learning that if they get five percent better than their parents, then they can keep running the world. I can’t sign that piece of paper. Because I think you should be fired. I think you should be done.

(Beat.)

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(JANINE starts laughing.) JANINE. Why me?

Why couldn’t you have wanted to study microeconomics. Or cognitive psychology. Or art history – oh, you would have loved them. Them and their Dutch Masters. I mean have you met the other people on this faculty? I could give you a list of professors who’ve slept with undergraduates. There are multiple people in this department who told me to quit when I had a kid. There is a person in the math department who voted for George Wallace. And you go after me?

ZOE. It takes work to not be a bad person. You know that right? You can’t just be the least bad person in a lineup and call yourself good.

JANINE. I did everything that was ever asked of me. I did the best that I possibly could. If you had been born who I was, when I was, you would have the same opinions, you would have made all the same mistakes. You cannot say I am a bad person if there was no way for me to be better.

ZOE. Someone else can be better. That’s why I want you out / of the way.

JANINE. I have won teaching awards. I have mentored accomplished people who have done wonderful things.

ZOE. You are an inherently oppressive and uninspiring figure for the students who matter most.

JANINE. That’s unfair. (ZOE laughs.)

Don’t laugh – that’s not – that’s not funny. You are describing a world where I am not right for a job because of my age and my skin color that’s not funny that’s – that’s awful.

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ZOE. Good. Good. I want you to feel awful, because that is what’s fair. You know I am actually enjoying the opiate crisis. I like it that white people are having trouble with drug addiction. I want them to know how it feels. I want a white student to walk into this college and have only black professors. I want an all–black Supreme Court. / And all-black juries. I want you to sit in front of an all-black tenure committee. I want you all to work for four hundred years and not be paid a dime.

JANINE. You’re describing a fantasy – just – numerically –

JANINE. That’s not justice. You are not describing justice, you are describing revenge.

ZOE. I am describing the world as I see it. JANINE. To want another human being to be “done”?

What a terrible sentiment. You can’t imagine what it is, to make it through sixty years doing your absolute best, and then one day you find out you’ve made a mistake, and then that’s all anyone can see. Someday you will make a mistake Zoe. And when you do, I hope you are up against a person as bereft of empathy as yourself.

(Beat.) ZOE. Look it’s – it’s really simple.

It’s not enough for you to be right. Or even for you to be good. You have to give up some of your power. Because you have too much.

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You have more than your fair share. (Beat.)

JANINE. I do not think a renewal of this fight between us is what this campus needs. We both know that there are very serious very urgent problems / out there in the world right now. And I think good people should not be fighting amongst themselves.

ZOE. I give up. I give up. I give up on you. You have wasted so, so much of my time, never hearing –

JANINE. Maybe above all – I don’t think this is good for you. More of these articles. More of these worries about your future.

ZOE. Oh. Yeah. Very convincing. JANINE. No, really.

I think given your history of mental illness it would be better for you if the news coverage stopped.

ZOE. I don’t have a history of mental illness. JANINE. You took a month-long leave of absence your junior

year of high school for mental health reasons. ZOE. No I didn’t. JANINE. I’m not going to say who, but someone from your

high school faculty went to teachers college with a college friend.

ZOE. I didn’t take a leave of absence, I completed an independent project instead of going to class. Because my classes were uninspiring and stupid.

JANINE. You wrote a piece in your creative nonfiction class here about your search for a perfect antidepressant.

ZOE. A piece that ended with my decision to do without them.

JANINE. Only – it’s easy to imagine the articles. “Behind public activism, a history of personal trouble.”

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It would be – more unpleasantness. More division. Another friend, who went to Johns Hopkins with my wife, said that the recording of our conversation included many classic symptoms of people who’ve suffered repeated mental trauma, and who’ve become a bit paranoid and hysterical as a result.

ZOE. I’m not paranoid. Or hysterical. JANINE. You did say, “I will go crazy, I will have no joy.”

“Everything is tainted,” you did say that. ZOE. Anyone can listen to that recording. Anyone can hear

what you did. JANINE. And do you think they will hear it? The general

public in this country? The members of the tenure committee? Do you trust my colleagues to agree with you instead of me? The same ones who you say look at you like a bomb that’s about to go off?

(Beat.) ZOE. What would your son think of you now? JANINE. All I want is what I had before.

The thing is, Zoe. If you make it too difficult to be a good person, you all of a sudden make people strangely comfortable with being a bad person.

(Beat.) ZOE. Do you know what made me decide to turn on my

recorder? JANINE. I haven’t the faintest clue. I’ve wondered about

that. I’d assumed when you showed me the phone that you must have been recording from the beginning but you weren’t.

ZOE. No. I wasn’t. JANINE. So? What was it? ZOE. You said I wouldn’t get ahead if I alienated powerful

people like you. JANINE. That?

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That’s all? That’s all I did? I told you the truth?

ZOE. That’s exactly how power works. You get to say that people have to make you happy. They have to talk just so. Act really perfect. If they ever challenge you, they have to do it in just the right way, very respectfully – and never too much. Or you’ll hurt them. With a grade. With an article. With a taser. With a bullet. Do things my way or I will hurt you. That’s the opposite of whatever America’s supposed to be. I’m not playing along. I do – I have enough privilege to say, “Uh-uh.” Publish whatever you want. Do. Your. Worst. Because the minute you do not hold anything over me. I think that’s the minute I will finally be free. The thing is – I’m done with this place. I am tired of trying to work with these compromised, rotten things. My whole generation’s done with it. The past can go fuck itself. America’s still waiting for its real, radical revolution. I’m gonna help bring it about.

JANINE. You. Idiot. You missed the whole point of class! Radical revolutions don’t work. They turn out terribly for the countries they happen in. Do you want to know countries that had a radical revolution? Haiti. Russia. Iran. Do you seriously think you’d rather be living in one of those countries right now? Seriously? Do you think the Cultural Revolution made China better off?

ZOE. I think people in those countries aren’t still living under their old oppressors.

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JANINE. Because a hundred million of them died. Do you have no respect for that? You little American baby. You have no idea how badly things can go. You know how many people moved to the U.S. in the last century?

ZOE. Well a lot of them are moving back since they were treated so terribly –

JANINE. You know how many people moved to Poland in that time? Nobody. Fucking. Nobody. Revolutions. Suck. They suck. Revolutions lead to death, and chaos, and scarcity, and then two years later a brand-new oppressor. They are not. Worth it. That was the whole point of class. Thank God America didn’t have a radical revolution.

ZOE. Thank God those slaves never rose up. JANINE. …Yes. ZOE. You know what you are? JANINE. Let me guess. A racist? ZOE. You’re a coward.

You could never have been Washington. You would have been tugging on his arm, saying, “Wait a minute George, someone might not like this, wait, there’s tiny little things you’re not getting right!”

JANINE. You never listened. You learned absolutely nothing. And now whatever you set out to do is going to go wrong. Ten percent, Zoe. You’re in the minority. How exactly do you think a war is going to go?

ZOE. If you were so afraid of revolutions – you should have worked harder to make them unnecessary. Oh, I brought this back.

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(She hands JANINE her book on South Asia.) I don’t want your books.

JANINE. No. Of course you don’t. Of course you don’t. You and your whole fucking generation. Of savages.

ZOE. You know what I hear when I listen to you? JANINE. Your own thoughts? ZOE. A death rattle.

(The lights snap out.)

End of Play

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