Almost everyone in "Spinning Into Butter" is a racist. But this play isn't about cross-burning bigots. It's not even about people who resist integrating their neighborhood out of concern for their property values. It's about people who deplore those folks -- white people who not only have good intentions but are actively trying to do something positive and practical to bridge this country's racial chasm. "Spinning Into Butter" is about the racism in these people.
Rebecca Gilman's premise is that the disease of racism has infected American life so thoroughly that we've all been poisoned. The playwright sets her forensic examination of this sickness at fictional Belmont College, a small, elite school nestled into the pristine hills of Vermont. Painfully aware of its exclusive image, Belmont is trying to attract more students of color to the campus, and has hired a new dean of students to help accomplish this. Sarah Daniels (Henny Russell) is white -- in TheaterWorks' production she's even pale and blonde -- but she has come here from an all-black inner-city college, Belmont's monoracial mirror image.
Trouble bursts into the college when one of the new black students reports finding racist notes tacked to the door of his dorm room. One of these says just "Little Black Sambo" -- a reference to the controversial children's book and the source of the play's title. In the story, a group of African tigers gets so agitated over the little fellow that they chase each other round and round in a circle until they dissolve into a pool of butter.
Here, the spinning tigers are Belmont faculty and administrators, each of whom has a different response to the crisis. There's Dean Kenney (Maeve McGuire), a no-nonsense problem-solver who just wants to collar the perpetrator and keep the thing out of the papers. There's Ross Collins (Chris Hutchison), the rumpled young nonconformist on the faculty, who sees the episode as a prime learning opportunity for the student body. He sets up a series of earnest campus forums that only succeed in polarizing the community and turning most of the students off. And there's stuffy old Professor Strauss (Edwin J. McDonough), an academic snob whose default attitude is patronizing and who takes offense when the black students are offended by it. There's also Greg Sullivan (Gregory Patrick Jackson), an enterprising white student who wants to form an anti-racist student organization, not least because it will help pad his resume for law school applications.
Gilman's script is a fascinating study of hate and self-hate; of human attitudes, fears, defenses, and complexities. But it's more a seminar than a play. It skewers every politically correct cliché and knee-jerk liberal pose -- often quite humorously -- but too much of the dialogue sounds as if it's been transcribed from a diversity training session. (The playwright has also slipped a few subtle jokes into the script. The name of the college, Belmont, refers slyly to the country estate of the wealthy patricians in Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice". And the college president is named Garvey, like the radical black nationalist of a century ago.)
Each of Gilman's seven characters is fashioned primarily as the representation of a particular stance or point of view. This goes for the only non-white character, too, who is not the student receiving the racial slurs, but the self-described Newyorican Patrick Chibas, a combative young man who's who's positively itching to be offended by almost anything a white person says to him.
Steve Campo's production for TheaterWorks is smart, fast-moving and effective. This is the biggest production the pocket-size theater has ever staged. Not only does it boast a record seven actors, but Luke Hegel-Cantarella has given it a splendid set: sunlight pours through the sparkling windows in Dean Daniels' wood-paneled office, where the bookshelves reveal works of Frantz Fanon and Susan Faludi and pride of place is given to a signed photo of Hilary Clinton.
All the actors acquit themselves more than adequately, but because the play is so schematic, the performances are almost inevitably two-dimensional. Henny Russell gives the evening's most compelling performance in the play's only really complex role. Dean Daniels is thoughtful, concerned, conflicted, and finally frustrated into delivering one of the play's two startling examples of how tightly all of us are clutching ambivalent, even hateful feelings.
The playwright is delivering a message here, but "Spinning Into Butter" is not a polemic. Gilman raises hard questions with no easy answers. One tentative possibility she seems to offer is the value of honest dialogue -- ugly feelings, even those masked by good intentions, must be expressed if there is to be any movement on the racial battlefront. The play is certainly intended to spin off debate and discussion, as it did when it shook things up at Lincoln Center two years ago. One sign of TheaterWorks' intentions during this run is the company's offer of free tickets to middle- and high-school students for certain performances.
"Spinning Into Butter" may not qualify as an aesthetic success, but live theater's job is not simply to entertain, to make us laugh and cry. Since ancient times, the theater has also served as a kind of civic forum, where society's burning issues are enacted as a spur to reflection and dialogue. "Spinning Into Butter" is a worthy part of that dramatic tradition.