New Mexico Actors Lab To Open 2024 With THE NICETIES and OLEANNA

New Mexico Actors Lab will open its 2024 season with a pair of thought-provoking, controversial two-character plays, Eleanor Burgess' The Niceties and David Mamet's Oleanna. The two plays will be performed May 8 - June 16 in rotating repertory (alternating performances) to highlight both their parallels and differences.

These first two plays of the season tackle some of the thornier issues of integrity and ignorance in academia with two powerful renditions of the professor/student conference gone bad in The Niceties and Oleanna. Deep dives into racial identity and sexual harassment will draw audiences into two very different decades of social awareness. The New York Times said of Eleanor Burgess' The Niceties, "The parallels to David Mamet's controversial classic Oleanna are clear: A 20-year-old undergraduate meets one-on-one with a professor who fatally underestimates her. By the end of their conversation, the professor's career is in jeopardy, the militant student bent on its destruction. But where Mr. Mamet made his student a feminist straw woman menacing a man who doesn't much deserve it, the likable yet merciless Zoe is the one we're meant to root for here, against a professor who is guilty as charged." The Niceties will be directed by Robert Benedetti and performed by Karen Ryan and Baby True.

Oleanna, Mamet's impassioned response to the Clarence Thomas hearing, will mark Suzanne Lederer's directing debut with NMAL, and will be performed by Emily Rankin and Geoffrey Pomeroy. The New York Times described Oleanna as "wholly absorbing -- a typically virtuoso display of Mr. Mamet's gift for locking the audience inside the violent drama of his characters.... As usual with Mr. Mamet, the vehicle for that combat is crackling, highly distilled dialogue unencumbered by literary frills or phony theatrical ones."

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