Spinning into Butter is a play by the American playwright Rebecca Gilman. It was premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 1999 and was later produced at the Lincoln Center and the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs. It was named one of the best plays of 1999 by Time and eventually became the third-most-produced play of the 2000-01 season in America.
Plot synopsis
The play takes place at fictional Belmont College, a mostly-white liberal arts school in Belmont, Vermont. The curtain opens on Sarah Daniels, Dean of Students, talking with sophomore Patrick Tyler Chibas. Wanting Patrick Tyler to receive a scholarship for minority students, Sarah convinces him to mark his ethnicity as Puerto Rican, even though he considers himself to be "Nuyorican", which is not a university-recognized ethnicity at Belmont.
The next scene shows Professor Ross Collins, Head of Humanities Burton Strauss and Dean Catherine Kenny waiting to have a meeting with Sarah. When Sarah comes in, she tells them that freshman Simon Brick, one of the few African-American students, has started receiving hateful, racist notes. The all-white administration scrambles to contain the problem and reassure parents that everything is under control. Strauss proposes scheduling a meeting to discuss racism. Ross and Kenny agree that this is a good idea. However, Sarah wants to talk to Simon before holding a campus-wide meeting. She suspects that he would be embarrassed if other students knew about the notes.
Two weeks later, senior Greg Sullivan comes to Sarah's office. He has been inspired by the race forum and asks her about forming a student group called "Students for Tolerance". Sarah thinks this is a great idea.
Ross informs Sarah that there will be a second meeting to discuss race. She found the first meeting unproductive and suggests that the next one have some effect beyond a lot of white people discussing how bad racism is. Burton comes in and informs them that Greg Sullivan has asked him to sponsor the Students for Tolerance organization.
Simon receives another racist note beginning, "Little Black Sambo". Sarah decides to talk to Simon, but before she can go, Patrick Tyler comes to see her and informs her that when he received the scholarship, his financial aid was taken away. She reassures him that she will get it back. Patrick Tyler is still upset and tells her that the race forum was insulting and patronizing. Sarah convinces him to bring this up at the next forum.
The next day, Sarah meets with Patrick to discuss his editorial in the school newspaper. She reads from Patrick Tyler's article discussing Burton's patronizing outburst at the second race forum; when Patrick Tyler and other students tried to speak out about their feelings, Burton yelled at them. The article describes racism being widespread throughout the administration. It tells of Patrick Tyler being offered a scholarship before the college even knew his ethnicity, which he understands to be tokenism that insults the entire student body. He informs her that he, the Black Student Union, and almost everyone he knows is boycotting the next race forum and that he is going to another school in the spring because he hates Belmont. Sarah is sorry and says she was not paying attention to who he was.
The president of the school receives a letter from Patrick Tyler and is upset about the racial discord. So Catherine asks Sarah to write a ten-point plan of how to eliminate racism at Belmont. Sarah stays late at school to work on the plan. Ross comes by and Sarah, in a controversial scene, reveals to him her not-so-latent racism. She tells Ross that before working at Belmont, she worked at Lancaster, a mostly black college. She calls blacks lazy, stupid, scary, loud, belligerent, abusive and rude. She says of Lancaster, "There were plenty of nice kids, but they weren't the ones you noticed." Sarah also reveals that when choosing a seat on the bus, she looks first for a seat by a white person, then a yellow person, and lastly a black person. Ross says, "Most people are just racists. They don't know they're racists."
Sarah learns that Simon wrote the notes to himself. While she is away visiting him, Kenny goes into Sarah's office and discovers racist remarks written on Sarah's notebook. Sarah tells Ross about her visit with Simon. She explains that the boy said he saw himself writing the notes but felt like someone else was doing it. Sarah says she told him, "Stop hating yourself."