Spinning into Butter

Set on a college campus in Vermont, Spinning into Butter is a new play by a major young American playwright that explores the dangers of both racism and political correctness in America today in a manner that is at once profound, disturbing, darkly comic, and deeply cathartic. Rebecca Gilman challenges our preconceptions about race relations, writing of a liberal dean of students named Sarah Daniels who investigates the pinning of anonymous, clearly racist letters on the door of one of the college's few African American students. The stunning discovery that there is a virulent racist on campus forces Sarah, along with other faculty members and students, to explore her feelings about racism, leading to surprising discoveries and painful insights that will rivet and provoke the reader as perhaps no play since David Mamet's Oleanna has done.

Spinning into Butter had its world premiere at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in May 1999 and will open at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center in New York in April 2000.

What happens when conflicting emotions inhabit the same space? When a new vocabulary is devised to disguise the same old thoughts? In this barbed satire of political correctness, Rebecca Gilman’s provocative characters spin a web of their own, revealing the latent racism that may lurk beneath the porcelain veneer of a liberated conscience.

Library Journal

Gilman has received numerous awards for her plays, which include Glory of Living. Boy Gets Girl, which had its premiere in Chicago on March 16, 2000, considers what happens when a blind date turns into a living nightmare. This brilliant and thought-provoking new drama takes us into the life of Theresa, a New York City magazine reporter who suddenly finds herself being terrorized by a stalker after she rejects him. In Spinning into Butter, an unprecedented incident of racism on the campus of idyllic Belmont College, VT, forces Sarah Daniels, the liberal-minded dean of students, to confront her own demons of prejudice and fears while also exposing the shallow minds and insincerity of the other administrators. (An ironic plot twist reveals the significance of the play s title.) Here, Gilman challenges us to think about the dangers of racism and political correctness. Her skillful use of dialog to create character and move the plot is evident in both of these new plays, which are highly recommended for modern drama collections at public and academic libraries. Howard Miller, St. Louis Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Rebecca Gilman was born in Trussville, Alabama, a small town outside Birmingham. She briefly attended Middlebury College in Vermont in the early 1980s and has lived in Chicago since 1994, after she received a graduate degree in theater from the University of Iowa.