Spinning into Butter

If you like your racial politics tidy, you’ll want to drop in on Spinning into Butter, where playwright Rebecca Gilman is keeping a very clean house. The story of a white liberal college dean—who in handling a racist incident on campus is forced to come to terms with her own prejudices—gets so close to the nucleus of the issue you can see its breath on the glass. Then, just when you think it’s about to get ugly (to say nothing of real), it quietly backs away, resolving its conflicts neatly and tying a bow around itself.

But now for Kerry Richlan. Butter’s famous money scene is the second-act monologue in which Sarah discloses how riding Chicago’s CTA systematically turned her into a racist (one by one, she eliminated ethnic groups she was willing to sit next to). Richlan nails it, slowly and carefully revealing Sarah’s instincts, as the intellectual in her knows that her most primal emotions are damning. The character has often been played (by fine actors) as a snowy WASP whose frigid appearance alone would make her inaccessible to troubled students. But self-deprecating brunet Richlan feels like someone you know. And like. Nothing about her take on the portentous speech seems phony.

The rest of Jethmalani’s production is perfectly solid, even if the cast struggles to sell implausible plot elements like grown-ups hiding under desks, and obvious metaphors (like the titular one about Little Black Sambo). And with Richlan at its center, Eclipse nearly eclipses the play’s nearsighted flaws.—Christopher Piatt