NEW MEXICO ACTORS LAB ANNOUNCES SPRING

2024 PLAYS TO BE PRESENTED IN

ROTATING REPERTORY

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO –

Nicholas Ballas, Artistic Director of The New Mexico Actors Lab, announced

today that the 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 inrotating repertory (alternating performances) to highlight both their parallels and differences.

Eleanor Burgess’ The Niceties concerns Zoe, a black 20-year-old undergraduate, who is called to a meeting

with Janine, a liberal white Ivy League professor, to discuss Zoe’s paper on the effect of slavery on American history.

Their meeting begins respectfully, but subsequent meetings steadily deteriorate into personal assaults and the unmasking of the professor’s unconscious biases. Set in 2016 during the fateful presidential primary campaign, The Niceties was described by the Los Angeles Times as “a shrewd piece of writing.... (that) takes a crowbar to the jagged generation gap between those in power and the disruptive new thinkers radical enough to expose the way their elders — including many who identify as progressives — so often pull the ladder up after themselves, as if to defend whatever hard-fought advances they have made.” Burgess is a rising American playwright and screenwriter whose work has been produced across the United States, including at Manhattan Theatre Club, Geffen Playhouse, Portland Stage Company, and the Contemporary American Theatre Festival.

Oleanna, by Pulitzer Prize-winner and Tony-nominated David Mamet, portrays the power struggle between John, a university professor up for tenure, and Carol, one of his female students who initially comes to see him about her grades. The meeting leads to her making a complaint of sexual harassment with the backing of an activist student organization, which threatens John’s career and tenure. When it was first staged in 1992, the play drew comparisons to the Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas debate during Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation hearing. The play’s shocking ending demonstrates the power of theatre and its ability to polarize discussion. NMAL’s production will offer an opportunity to revisit the debate in the context of the #MeToo era. 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.... John and Carol go to it with hand-to-hand combat that amounts to a primal struggle for power.

As usual with Mr. Mamet, the vehicle for that combat is crackling, highly distilled dialogue unencumbered by literary frills or phony theatrical ones.”

The two plays will alternate performances in the spring of 2024 from May 8 to June 23.

All performances will be held at NMAL’s permanent home, the Lab Theater, located at 1213 Parkway Drive in Santa Fe –one

block from Meow Wolf.

For more information email kfolivant@gmail.com.