The Theatre Cooperative looks to have the first hit on their boards in a while. This underfunded group's been presenting plays with provocative content and significant messages for a while, usually to small audiences. Attention is overdue. Unfortunately Rebecca Gilman's "Spinning into Butter" addresses its subject of racism embedded in "white" society too timidly. "Advice to the Players" by Bruce Bonafede, which ran too briefly there on Broadway earlier in the season, was a much stronger piece. Sadly this long one-act had to be presented in late August when the actors needed were available, but audiences were scarce. Though "Spinning in Butter" began in Chicago at the Goodman and has been done at Lincoln Center, this tentative effort seems better suited for campus production and discussion than general public performance. The Coop does however share some of the qualities of Chicago's storefront Circle Theatre where Gilman first came to attention with her more sensational script, "The Glory of Living."
Director Leslie Chapman gets solid if not particularly inspired performances from an experienced local cast including Lida McGirr as Dean Kenney and Fred Robbins as Prof. Strauss, Humanities Chair. These two community theatre veterans--McGirr last seen as Flavia in "Timon" outdoors in Concord this summer, Robbins in several shows hither and yon last season--bring the right touch of permanent artifice to their roles. The play takes place at a small college in Vermont where a black freshman has received threatening racist notes. The only two students shown are Carlos Folgar as Patrick Chibas, a self-defined NuYorRican on scholarship, and Ron Rittinger as Greg, a frat boy who organizes a student tolerance group, mostly because it will look good on his law school application. Both young men turn in believable performances.
At the center of the action is Korinne T. Hertz, as Sarah Daniels, a young Dean of Students recently hired away from an urban Black college. She's white, but no one else qualified wanted the job. To complicate matters, Sarah's had a fling with Dr. Collins, the Art History professor,. played by David Rabinow. The cad's just gone back to his old flame, Petra the Dance Teacher, who returns from sabbatical at the beginning of the play. Sarah's only confidant seems to be Meyers, head of Security, gently underplayed by Anthony Dangerfield The whole show reflects the author's two years at Middlebury before returning to Alabama to finish her B.A. The play would probably be truer if it had been set in the South rather than Vermont. Her heroine is a naïf both personally and professionally; Sarah knows how to go through all the motions but not how to access the consequences, i.e. she's young.
The problems with this script, which seems purpose written for a small, economically viable cast, begin when Petra never makes it onstage. The presence of the other woman might have made the rather tepid personal aspects of the play more interesting, or at least have provided a context for the heroine's somewhat forced self-revelations in the middle of the second act. More significantly, no black students appear at all; not even Simon Brick, who reported receiving the threatening notes. In fact it's revealed only in the final scene of the play that there is an active black student organization on campus. Such a usually vocal group somehow has never become involved in the crisis, a highly improbable circumstance. The author seems more interested in the antics of academic politics than the putative problem of the play. Gilman also gets lost in possibly autobiographical details trying to create a raison d'être for her heroine. Consequently the action peters out at the end, leaving provocative questions just lying there, for all her skillful scene making and clever dialogue. The "other" just isn't onstage; the conflicts shown are internal and ultimately trivial.
This play is the gentlest in Gilman's catalog so far, which has involved various forms of sexual violence for the most part. "Spinning Into Butter" seems just that, an exercise in restraint in pursuit of an intellectual concept. And while Chicago found her satire of liberal Yankee racism enlightening, the New York critics found the whole thing rather shallow. Boston has been tolerant, but quick to point out that the general effect of the play's arguments is rather defeatist. Most missed the somewhat jaded comments of Meyer's from campus security, who knows that academic snobbery isn't racism per se, but mostly very smart self-involved people being stupid about other folks in general. And no one noted locally, at least in print, that the play itself simply mirrors the problem it presents, and by way of remedy doesn't suggest anything more than Rodney King's plaintive cliche. Which raises interesting questions. Is a play that at least raises the question of deep-seated racism and gets done better for the theatre than the stacks of unproduced scripts which attempt to tackle the question head on ? What is the better way to bring this subject to the stage?
It should be noted in closing that Doc Madison and his crew of part-timers have realized a convincing office set surrounded by seating. It's adequately lit and effectively costumed given the limited resources at the Theatre Coop in its space at the Elizabeth Peabody House, a vintage settlement house occupying an old wooden church. Ancient Rome for "Romulus" at the end of the season will be a bigger challenge, however.