Spinning into Butter: A Play

Rebecca Gilman

Apr 2011 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About this ebook

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 opened at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center in New York in April 2000.

Ratings and reviews

I loved this play. As an actress, the words easily trip off the tongue. I used one of the speeches for an audition here in NYC. It was the one where Sarah told Ross about Simon writing the notes to himself. The casting director and director were very impressed. I believe it was because it is a topic that I am so invested in and emotional about. The language is so true to how one speaks in day to day conversations, it made my job very easy. I would love to do this play and use it for a basis of discussion in an environment where honesty is accepted and not shut down. Perhaps then we can begin to move forward with acceptance rather than tolerance. I would have liked Sarah to have come to some conclusions about why she felt that way about black people. I would also like to see Ross perhaps challenge her with a comparison of white people who are poor and under-served and undereducated to see if she felt that way about them as well. Perhaps we would see a correlation between behavior and character as opposed to race. Thought provoking. It even made me think about my rules on the subway!! For me it's more about threatening posturing as opposed to race.

About the author

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.