Playwright: Rebecca Gilman
At: Eclipse Theatre at the
Victory Gardens Theater,
2257 N. Lincoln
Contact: ( 773 ) 871-3000; $22; $18 students and seniors with ID
Runs through: Sept. 3
BY CATEY SULLIVAN
There's an air of smug superiority hanging in the air at Belmont College, the ivied enclave of earnestly proclaimed liberal ideals and progressive thinking that serves as the setting of Rebecca Gilman's Spinning Into Butter.
So when someone starts scrawling violent, graphic racial slurs on the dorm room door of Simon Brick, one of the college's ( very ) few minority students, everyone moves into full-blown crisis mode. This is an ugly public-relations disaster. And of course, Simon's got to be feeling pretty bad, too.
Briskly directed by Anish Jethmalani for the Eclipse Theatre Company, Spinning Into Butter is a brutal expose of the heart's hidden recesses and the sort of attitudes and feelings that decent, self-aware people spend a lifetime trying to squelch and deny they have.
This makes Belmont Dean Sarah Daniels ( Kerry Richlan ) all the more unusual. Backed into a corner, she actually articulates out loud her struggle with her own ugly, deeply rooted attitudes. Never mind that she's spent her professional life trying to help minority students, be it by getting them scholarships or smoothing out the endless rolls of administrative red tape that can make the pursuit of a higher education seem like a futile exercise in bureaucracy.
What she admits about herself shocks as much because she says it out loud as because of the revelation itself.
A bit of such merciless self-examination by Sarah's colleagues—the petty, self-important Dean Strauss ( Larry Baldacci ) ; the image-conscious Dean Catherine Kenney ( Cheri Chenoweth ) ; and the whiny, emotionally clueless Ross Collins ( Robert McLean ) —would go a long way.
But Gilman's not just pointing fingers at white racism here—she goes after reverse racism, too. Presented with the offer of a $12,000 scholarship, Nuyorican student Patrick Chibas goes into disproportional attack mode when he's asked to put 'Hispanic' or 'Puerto Rican' on the application. And then there's Simon Brick, the target of the racial slurs. He's not a character in the play, but his actions eventually take all the implications of Spinning Into Butter and complicate them beyond measure.
Sarah Daniels is the center of the piece, and in Richlan's portrayal, she is a constant portrait of pleading and apology; the strength of the character is a bit lost in facial tics of guilt and defensiveness.
As the angry young Nuyorican who lashes out at Daniels' attempts to procure him a scholarship, Gerardo Cardenas creates a strong, believable character bristling with rage. Also memorable is Chenoweth as Dean Catherine Kenney, a true survivor in the rarified world of academia and all the behind-the-scenes politics and public presentations that color it.
