SPINNING INTO BUTTER by Rebecca Gilman
Source: New York Times

Race Issues Folded Into the Caldron of Academe
by Margo Jefferson

Clearly the question isn't only, "What do we mean when we talk about race?" It's also, How do we sound despite what we mean or what we feel or want to feel? That's what happens when two languages share one space: anger and shame, for instance, or confrontation and equivocation.  Language can rule and reduce us. We get stuck with (and in) the same old phrases when we want to say and feel something new, or (uglier and scarier) we devise a new vocabulary to disguise the same old thoughts.

That conundrum is at the center of Rebecca Gilman's much talked-about play, "Spinning Into Butter." You've probably read something about its journey from Chicago's Goodman Theater to New York's Lincoln Center, where it opened last night at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater as part of Lincoln Center Festival 2000. And you may have read something about the controversial second-act speech in which a perfectly decent, basically well-meaning white woman talks about certain uncontrollable reactions to black people, using words like "lazy" and "stupid," and insists that these reactions cannot be canceled out by the presence of perfectly decent, well-educated black friends in one's life.

The play has as many twists as a farce, and that's what it is -- a
post-comic, post-tragic farce. You know the line about history being
played out first as tragedy and then as farce. We've been there and done that. Now, when it comes to life and language, we're stuck with banality, expediency and bursts of passionate intensity.

When the play begins, four administrators at Belmont, a liberal arts
college in Vermont with white-columned buildings and a largely white
student body, are going about their daily business. That includes
balancing the curriculum between courses with intellectual content and
courses in wine-tasting and skiing, awarding scholarships and
renegotiating their love affairs. And then a crisis erupts. A black freshman begins getting racist notes, clearly from someone on the
campus.

In academe, public relations matter as much as pedagogy. Of the -- let's
call them the Belmont Four -- Dean Catherine Kenney (the tartly
officious Brenda Wehle) and Dean Burton Strauss (a touchy and pompous Henry Strozier) go for damage control by way of public mea culpas.

They immediately call for campus meetings where everyone can talk about racism. They're backed by Ross Collins (Daniel Jenkins), an art
professor, and opposed by Sarah Daniels (Hope Davis), the dean of
students and the only one in actual contact with Simon Brick, the black
student.

Simon Brick is never seen onstage -- news of his reactions comes through the Belmont Four and a security guard named Mr. Meyers (Matt DeCaro). And indeed, we see only two students in the course of the play, a comment in itself on the ever-widening gap between how schools are run and who they are supposedly running for.

The two students we do see, like all Ms. Gilman's characters, walk a
tightrope between being individuals and being types. I don't mind this
-- aren't we most likely to walk that rope when race or some other kind
of difference confounds us? And, as we also see here, when power
hierarchies confine us? Dean Strauss can insult Sarah publicly; if she
wants to mock him, she must do it behind his back

And, in turn, she can impose her will.

One of the students, Patrick Chibas (Jai Rodriguez), wants to be
described as Nuyorican on a scholarship application; she convinces him
that he won't get the money unless he calls himself Hispanic or Puerto
Rican.

The scenes between the two of them are some of the play's strongest --
the dynamics keep shifting. At first she is polite but unyielding while
he is outspoken but pliable; by the end she is defensive and apologetic
while he is indignant and defiant. It's the combination of elements:
white and Puerto Rican, administrator and student, woman and man, adult and child.

An affair between Sarah and Ross is collapsing when the play begins, and Sarah rockets between witty, clearheaded disdain and anxious hurt. Ms. Davis moves through emotional loops and flickers without any visible strain or grandstanding, but if you've seen her in plays like "The Food Chain" or movies like "Next Stop, Wonderland" you know how good she is. It's too bad that this plotline basically disappears. It's a good way of reminding us that the personal never stops demanding equal time, whatever larger issues threaten to overwhelm us.

But the personal does flare up -- flare up, burn and blister -- when
Sarah talks openly about blacks and her shift from wide-eyed liberalism
to ardent radicalism to guilty loathing. But "shift" is wrong: all of
these feelings and beliefs are inside her. She's terrified they'll burst
out and destroy everything in sight.

A white friend and I debated the strengths and weaknesses of "Spinning
Into Butter" afterward. She felt that it was programmatic and that Ms.
Gilman was in the grip of self-righteousness. I felt that the
programmatic quality was more the fault of the director, Daniel
Sullivan. Ms. Gilman is struggling with it, but he could have tipped the
balance the other way. Here, as in his recent production of "A Moon for the Misbegotten," he reaches for the obvious whenever possible.

You can see this in most of the performances. As the senior deans, Ms.
Wehle and Mr. Strozier coast all too smoothly on caricature. Mr.
Jenkins's Ross is mostly shallow and boyish, which is fine when we first meet him. But as the stakes get higher (after all, he's the one Sarah
confesses her racial angst to) he needs more gravity.

Apart from Ms. Davis, I found the students, played by Mr. Rodriguez and Steven Pasquale, the most interesting to watch. For better or worse, their characters were still being formed, and that generated real tension.

I still feel that "Spinning Into Butter" is worth seeing. It will set something going in you, be it shame, irritable cynicism (as in "That's
news?") or excitement. And this is the material that theater needs to be
spinning, churning and beating into art.