Race matters Butter flies in Gloucester BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Spinning into Butter By Rebecca Gilman. Directed by Eric Engel. Set by Jenna McFarland. Lighting by Russ Swift. Costumes by Toni Bratton Elliott. Sound by Bradley Royds. With Nancy E. Carroll, Marc Carver, Neil A. Casey, Denise Cormier, Ray Jenness, Risher Reddick, and Jared Swanson. At Gloucester Stage Company through August 29.

Spinning into Butter takes its name from Helen Bannerman’s 1899 children’s story Little Black Sambo, in which the offensively named title character loses his new threads to a series of tigers more interested in sartorial splendor than in lunch. The beasts then get into an argument about which is the "grandest" and wind up chasing one another around a tree until they melt into butter, freeing up the boy’s garments and providing him an accompaniment for his pancakes. Rebecca Gilman’s 1999 play, which is set in motion by a racist incident on the campus of a New England college, is not about the African-American student who has received anonymous threats; he never appears. It’s about the well-meaning, self-deluding academic tigers that chase their tails toward meltdown in the frenzy of political correction and correctness that ensues. Part satire, part polemic, part dark night of the Caucasian soul, the play is about the objectification of blacks by whites — at least one of whom has the guts to confront the scared, alienated, Toni Morrison–hating devil dormant in her psyche.

Sarah Daniels is the young, endlessly apologetic diversity dean at Belmont College, a mostly white school in the ski-slope-studded hills of Vermont that bears some resemblance to Middlebury, where Gilman matriculated for two years. Embracing both the best intentions and the broadest generalizations, Sarah spends the first scene persuading a bright Nuyorican student to re-record his ethnicity as Hispanic or Latino — something the old farts on a committee that selects the recipient of a scholarship earmarked for minorities will understand.

But that’s a little landmine next to what blows up when the school’s chief of security arrives to report that an African-American freshman has found menacing racist notes taped to the door of his dorm room. This sends the academic establishment — represented by a couple of bristling older deans and the bedroom-eyed but forked-tongued art professor with whom Sarah has had an affair and is now locked in an uneasy friendship — into a tailspin of reaction, from cover-up to PR to campus-wide forums to decry racism. Only Sarah thinks it might be a good idea to talk with the individual, affronted student — a dialogue that, only at the end, when several tenures in bucolic academe have been terminated, gets off to a tentative start.

Spinning into Butter made its debut at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, where the playwright is based, and went on to be her first work professionally produced in New York. It received its area premiere in 2002, in an Elliot Norton Award–winning staging by the Theatre Cooperative. Now, at Gloucester Stage Company, it gets a more polished performance under the baton of Eric Engel, who with his sure but unobtrusive hand seems set to become the next David Wheeler. Taking advantage of the intimate GSC playing space, one-time fish-company digs in which set designer Jenna McFarland floats the granite arches and stately floor-to-ceiling windows of upscale academe, Engel’s production at first seems almost too conversational. But once the ear adjusts, this non-grandstanding naturalism makes Gilman’s lifting of the log of educated liberalism to reveal the bugs beneath more disarming.

Spinning into Butter is not a masterpiece; it’s more notable for its unflinching exploration than for its brilliant dramaturgy. The characters other than Sarah are semi-stereotypical, whether you’re talking the aggressive senior dean lent a military sharpness by Nancy E. Carroll or the equivocating-romancer-turned-appalled-confidant of Marc Carver, whose insulated art professor finds it simple to eschew racism since he never meets any black people. The petty, clueless academic amusingly played by Neil A. Casey is a pretty broad satiric target, and the salt-of-the-earth campus policeman is so idealized as to seem, according to Gilman’s own argument, patronized.

Still, there are enough plot twists and relationship sparks to keep Spinning into Butter from turning into a treatise. At the play’s heart is a 20-minute monologue by Sarah, a dissection of her own hard-fought-against racism so unsparing that it commands both horror and respect. At GSC, it’s delivered with frazzled, affecting honesty by Denise Cormier, who has never done better work than she does here.

Sarah came to Vermont, she confesses, to get away from the day-to-day interaction with students at an urban, mostly African-American university that found her, after years of immersing herself in black literature and thought, spiraling back on her own prejudice. "I’m fully aware that black people have agency and are responsible and can help themselves," she admits, "but I think they don’t do it because they’re lazy and stupid." Shocking? Yes. But this, Gilman implies, is the elephant in the room we have confront before we can slay it.