About the Play:

Spinning Into Butter has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female/Male Scenes.

Spinning Into Butter is a full-length drama by Rebecca Gilman. A crisis erupts at a small Vermont college when racist notes are posted on the dorm room door of one of the school's few African-American students. The newly-hired dean of students, races to defuse the whirlwind of emotions spun up by students and faculty, but before Spinning Into Butter reaches its surprise ending, she and the other whites on campus must first confront their own conflicted feelings about race.

Spinning Into Butter 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. When one of the few African American students at liberal Belmont College in Vermont begins receiving hate mail, the campus erupts, first with shock, then with mutual recrimination as faculty and students alike try to prove their own tolerance by condemning one another. At the center of this maelstrom is Sarah Daniels, the dean of students. As the administration sponsors public "race forums" and the students start their activist groups, Sarah is forced to explore her own feelings of racism. Her self-examination leads to some surprising discoveries and painful insights, the consequences of which even she can't predict.

Spinning Into Butter premiered in 1999 at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in May before transferring in 2000 to the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center off-Broadway in New York City. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been performed in professional theatres across the US and has been mounted by college theatres.

Cast: 2 female, 5 male

What people say:

"The 'issue' play makes a comeback with Spinning Into Butter, the highly anticipated Gotham debut of playwright Rebecca Gilman, whose work has been acclaimed in prior London and Chicago outings. Gilman's subject … is the latent racism that may lurk in the liberal hearts of well, people like New York theatergoers! It's a potent topic, and the playwright explores it with an admirable boldness as well as a nice leavening of humor." — Variety

"Rebecca Gilman's provocative new play tackles the issue of raciscm with fresh vitality while standing political correctness on its head." — New York Daily News

"This is a drama that will send audiences arguing into the night, and one that cries out to be seen." — The Daily Telegraph (UK)

"An extraordinarily fresh, eloquent, and candid new play ... by a writer of surprising gifts." — Chicago Tribune

"[Gilman is] dealing with how we define one another, measure success and failure, raise celebrities up and tear them down, and create different personas to cope with all the craziness of having a public identity. The parallels the playwright draws between the artist and baseball player are always smart and amusing. You might be tempted to leave the theater chanting 'Gil-man! Gil-man!'" — Boston Globe

About the Playwright:

Rebecca Gilman is an American playwright who received her M.F.A. in playwriting from the University of Iowa in 1991. She is the first American playwright to win an Evening Standard Award for The Glory of Living (seen in the UK at the Royal Court Theatre), which also won the George Devine Award, was named one of Time magazine's Best Plays of the Decade, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been produced in the US at such venues as the Lincoln Center Theatre in New York, the Public Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, Manhattan Class Company, in the UK at the Royal Court Theatre, as well as other theatres internationally. A native of Alabama, she was awarded the 2008 Harper Lee Award for Alabama's Most Distinguished Writer of the Year.