Spinning into Butter

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, Sarah Matthews, 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.