Spinning into Butter
A Play
ISBN10: 0571199844
ISBN13: 9780571199846
Trade Paperback
112 Pages
$16.00
CA$22.00
Winner of the Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays
Winner of the Jeff Award for new work
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.
Reviews
Praise for Spinning into Butter
"Ms. Gilman's head-on collision with this nuanced subject . . . invites an audience to recall the theater as topical and provocative."—Peter Marks, The New York Times
"Bold . . . a play so honest that labels seem beside the point . . . A work that is not at all neat, and that, by far, is its greatest virtue."—Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times
"A play of blistering force . . . [Gilman] is poised to have a major impact on
the American theater."—Chris Jones, Variety
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
Spinning into Butter
act one
The world premiere of Spinning into Butter was presented by the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois, on May 16, 1999. The artistic director of the Goodman Theatre is Robert Falls; the...