Willing to Say What Others Won’t

Just a few years ago, Rebecca Gilman’s playwriting career looked like a nonstarter. Now it’s on fast forward, driven largely by “Spinning Into Butter,” a much-debated play about subtle forms of racism in the presumably enlightened, inclusive halls of ivory-tower academia.

The play, having its Southern California premiere at the Laguna Playhouse, takes its title from “Little Black Sambo,” a once-popular children’s book now widely deemed unacceptable because of its racial stereotyping. In 1997, having just received the first commission of her career--$5,000--from Chicago’s largest resident theater, the Goodman, Gilman thought back on an incident from her student days at Middlebury College, a small liberal arts school in Vermont. Someone was putting racist notes on a black student’s door, and the campus was in an uproar of righteous outrage against racism.

Gilman, aware that most of the Goodman’s subscribers are white, says she decided to explore the hidden strata of racial bias in even well-meaning people--personified by the play’s sympathetic protagonist, Sarah Daniels, a young dean of students. In one scene, Sarah confesses, among other politically incorrect feelings usually left unsaid, the reasons that she fled from an urban school in Chicago to a nearly all-white campus in Vermont. “I just felt tired, contemptuous,” she tells a white colleague. “They weren’t going to listen to me. They weren’t going to graduate from college. They weren’t going to do anything with their lives. Not because they couldn’t but because they didn’t want to. Because they were lazy and stupid.”

I feel like everybody is racist to some extent,” Gilman, 37, said in a recent phone interview from her home in Columbus, Ohio. “Everybody has ugly thoughts at some point. What do you do with those ugly thoughts? Do you try to examine them? I believe you can change yourself if you really want to. I think that’s what Sarah is in the process of doing.”

“Spinning Into Butter” is also a satire on liberal self-righteousness and the bureaucratic imperatives of academia. The administration at Gilman’s fictional Belmont College is more concerned about avoiding a public relations disaster than in helping Simon Brick, the youth (never seen onstage) who is the target of the racist notes. Others on campus use the incident as an excuse for self-glorification.

The satire on bureaucracy has not gotten much press attention compared with the exploration of racism, Gilman said. “It’s not as high-profile an issue. But when I watch the play with an audience, I know they’re recognizing that, laughing at it and getting it.”

The premiere run of “Spinning Into Butter” in 1999 at the Goodman’s 135-seat Studio Theatre was extended for several weeks. Each performance was followed by an audience discussion about the play and the issues it raised.

“I heard people talk about race in ways I’ve never heard before,” said Roche Schulfer, the Goodman’s executive director. “It became another act to the play, a town meeting each night. It’s why you produce plays.”

The Goodman has since commissioned and produced two more of Gilman’s plays. In “Boy Gets Girl,” an innocent blind date turns into an obsessive stalking that forces its victim to dismantle everything in her life. “Blue Surge,” which premiered in July, concerns a police bust at a massage parlor that results in an ongoing relationship between two cops and two prostitutes.

Meanwhile, “Spinning Into Butter” has been on the boards across the country--the Laguna staging will be at least the eighth professional production in the U.S.

Two plays Gilman wrote during the mid-1990s, “The Glory of Living” and “The American in Me,” are also in circulation. “Glory,” based on a real-life case of serial murder in Gilman’s native Alabama, is about to have its New York City premiere; “American,” which deals with the issues of infertility treatment and corporate downsizing as they affect one Southern family, had its world premiere in July at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco.

“Spinning Into Butter” will be the first Gilman play seen in Southern California; she says she will not attend because she will be busy consulting with director Philip Seymour Hoffman on the New York production of “Glory” by the Manhattan Class Company and observing the London premiere of “Boy Gets Girl.” When that is over, she plans to start work on her fourth commission from the Goodman.

“David Mamet was the last writer we made that kind of commitment to,” Schulfer said. The theater’s artistic leadership, he added, is sold on Gilman as “a writer who has a great ability to get complicated issues onstage, but also creates characters and dramatic situations that are extraordinary.”

Not all critics have agreed that Gilman belongs in the company of Mamet. Reviewing the New York premiere of “Spinning Into Butter” at Lincoln Center, Newsday’s Linda Winer dismissed it as “a thoughtful but simple-minded play that keeps wishing it were dynamite. And so do we.” The New York Times’ Margo Jefferson, on the other hand, recommended it as a play that “will set something going in you, be it shame, irritable cynicism (as in, ‘That’s news?’) or excitement.”

Alexs Pate, an author and assistant professor of Afro-American and African studies at the University of Minnesota, published a commentary on “Spinning Into Butter” in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune after it opened there earlier this year. “The journey that Gilman takes us on is precisely the type of journey America (especially white America) must willingly and courageously embrace,” he wrote. But Pate added that as a black man, he found it too painful to watch because “one of the darkest places a black person can possibly go is into the inner world of white racism.... In a dark theater, I was forced to sit on my hands and take my punishment, to be defined by [Sarah’s] exorcism.”

“I don’t blame him,” Gilman said when told of the commentary. “Why should black people stand around while white people try to work out their stupid problems?”

Gilman said that she did not write any black characters into the play because part of its point is to show how all the white characters “created their own mythical Simon Brick, based on their own prejudices. So to have him come onstage, I thought, would cancel out everything I’d done.” She says she had hoped to dramatize the economic disparities that form the backdrop of the race issue in America, but could not make that fit without derailing the play’s dramatic momentum.

“It’s not an essay, it’s a play. And plays are limited in what they can address.” Gilman could not have imagined a few years ago that she would be generating all these productions, all this discussion.

After earning her master’s degree in playwriting from the University of Iowa, she got married, fell into the working world, and for three years put writing aside. She got a job in Iowa City, teaching testing-service employees how to grade student essays on standardized achievement tests. When her brief marriage to a fellow writer failed, she moved to Chicago and stayed in the testing field as a writer of essay questions.

“You get out there, and when it’s time to actually try [to pursue a writing career], it’s kind of scary,” she said. “A lot of people, myself included, create obstacles so you have an excuse” not to write. “I thought I needed to have a job. Money was always the problem.”

Finally, frustrated with her day job, Gilman pulled out the first act of “The Glory of Living,” written during her graduate school days. “I thought, ‘This is so much better than I remembered.’ I had an idea and finished it. I showed it to a friend and she said, ‘This is great. Why are you writing standardized tests?’ It was one of those ‘Duh!’ moments. I quit my job and decided I would just do temp work and be a playwright.”

“The Glory of Living” premiered at a small Chicago theater in December 1996 and attracted the attention of the Goodman, which gave Gilman her first commission. She was on her way. Now success as a playwright has brought her to ... a rented duplex apartment in Columbus. She recently moved there with her second husband, Charles Harmon, a former English professor who has become a student again, enrolled in a master’s degree fiction-writing program at Ohio State. The Goodman stipend--”Rebecca basically has a standing commission here for as long as she wants it,” says Schulfer--and a $30,000 Guggenheim fellowship that Gilman landed last spring will help pay bills. But, like all playwrights who emerge from the pack, she will probably have to reckon with Hollywood if she wants to parlay her stories and ideas into a plush living.

She has optioned “Spinning Into Butter” to a film producer and is working on a screen adaptation. But she doubts she will plunge deeply into film and television.

“I love to go see movies, but I don’t think cinematically. I justreally think for the stage, and I don’t have an overriding interest in making that shift. I know you make a lot more money, but you don’t have a lot of control. In theater, you have absolute control over your words. I’m not ready to relinquish that, and I don’t know if I [ever] will.” *

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“SPINNING INTO BUTTER,” Laguna Playhouse’s Moulton Theater, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Dates: Opens Saturday; ends Oct. 7. In previews Tuesday-Friday. Plays Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m.; and this Thursday, 2 p.m. Prices: $24-$45. Phone: (949) 497-2787.