Simon wasn't there: the Sambo strategy, consumable theater, and Rebecca Gilman's Spinning into Butter.

When Spinning into Butter debuted at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 1999, Rebecca Gilman was transformed, in the words of Chris Jones, from a struggling writer into "one of America's most talked-about and sought-after playwrights" (26). The positive response from critics and audiences extended the play's run at the Goodman three times, and its provocative treatment of hot-button political and social issues within the context of academia--a treatment that inspires comparisons to Mamet's Oleanna (which, seven years earlier, also debuted at the Goodman)--garnered heated responses. (1) According to Joanne Kaufman, "Audiences tended to see it as a gauntlet thrown down, a challenge to talk honestly about race" (39). (2) And talk they did. People began sticking around after the play to discuss the issues explored on stage.

In an early review, Chris Jones, writing for American Theatre, predicted that because of the enthusiastic interest from regional theaters, "the play is likely to show up on this magazine's next annual list of the most-produced plays of the season" (27). He was right, and after appearing at Lincoln Center and the Royal Court Theatre, Spinning into Butter was eventually identified as the third most-produced play of the 2000-2001 season ("The Season's" 86). Time also named it one of the best plays of 1999, which was followed by more accolades for Gilman, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Prince Prize for Commissioning New Work, the Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, and the George Devine Award. In addition, Gilman became the first American to win the London Evening Standard Award for most promising playwright, and her play The Glory of Living was a finalist for the Pulitzer. The commercial and critical success of Spinning into Butter stems, in part, from its shockingly controversial treatment of racism. At Belmont, a mostly-white liberal arts college in Vermont, an African American student named Simon Brick begins receiving hateful, racist notes. The Belmont administrators--who are all white--scramble to protect their institution from scandal and to flaunt their liberal credentials. The one exception is Sarah Daniels, a dean who, in the most-discussed scene of the play, shocks her colleagues by revealing in no uncertain terms her less-than-latent racism. The play is complicated further when authorities discover that Simon has been sending these notes to himself.

As Richard Zoglin comments, Gilman has a tendency to "grasp at big ideas" (132), an observation borne out by the subject material of some of her other plays: The Glory of Living (2001) presents a young mother who tries to please her husband by brutally murdering runaways and hitchhikers; Boy Gets Girl (2000) examines violence and power in gender relations; and Blue Surge (2001) is to class what Spinning into Butter is to race. "Miss Gilman," notes Mark Steyn, "likes 'issue' plays" (38). Yet because of Spinning's uniquely scandalous presentation of the racism lurking in a New England ivory tower, readers and spectators may fail to appreciate the complexity and subtlety of Gilman's critique of institutional power, a critique much more far reaching than most reviews acknowledge. In fact, once one gets past Sarah's startling speech, one might be tempted, as is Jonathan Kalb, to see the play as "seeming essentially obvious." But instead of merely presenting a wayward white liberal who, in the unveiling of her own racism, critiques the hollow political correctness of her colleagues, Spinning into Butter portrays what amounts to a multi-layered "theater of consumption." This term derives from the title of Gilman's play, which itself alludes to the well-known story of Sambo. When threatened by hungry tigers, Sambo restages the scene to neutralize the threat and eventually eats the tigers who have spun themselves into butter. Likewise, Gilman's characters create--with varying degrees of success--theaters of consumption in which they transform that which threatens their positions of academic and cultural power into that which they can consume.

Specifically, the Belmont officials hope to neutralize the threat posed by Simon, who has also learned from Sambo. To resist and indict the administration, Simon employs "the Sambo strategy"--a term coined by W. T. Lhamon, Jr., in his essay on Chuck Berry. If the theater of consumption is a staging of a threatening other, then the Sambo strategy is self-staging. Instead of acting the part scripted by the Belmont officials, Simon writes his own role and thus exposes the guilt of the unwitting administrators. The Sambo strategy thus functions as a resistance to the theater of consumption by wresting authorial control away from those in power.

Gilman suggests this reading by including a seemingly irrelevant anecdote near the play's beginning. In the first scene, Professor Ross Collins and Dean Sarah Daniels are arguing. In the middle of their conversation, Ross unexpectedly launches into a description of a strange encounter during a recent trip to New York. Seated on a crowded subway, he sees a man get on and sit across from him. Ross thinks to himself, "I've seen this man before." The man then "pulls out this small, laminated card and he holds it fight there, fight in front of his face, and he begins to read it silently. He's studying it furiously." Trying to make out the writing on the card, Ross leans across the aisle but can only see the title: "it's something biblical. Like 'John 12.24'" (13). Ross continues by describing the man's appearance: "while he's very neatly dressed, his clothes are rather shabby. His suit, for example, is too small and his shirt cuffs are fully exposed and they're stained at the edges, and the hems of his trousers are frayed, and his shoes are showing cracks in the leather" (13).

Ross's story calls attention to itself as a performance within a performance, a play within a play, designed not only to signal the important themes of Spinning into Butter, but also to instruct us how to read Gilman's play. "I was lucky to get a seat," Ross says, as if describing a night at the theater. (3) The curtain for his private drama rises when a man enters and sits before him. It is a simple production with one actor doing only one thing: reading furiously. Ross's uncertainty about the content of the card is instructive. It's something biblical. It's like John 12.24. Unable to decipher it certainly, he projects onto this card a Bible verse: "Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." In assigning a specific verse to this man's laminated card, Ross moves from audience member to playwright. As he recounts his play to Sarah, he adds commentary to justify his decision: "I felt [...] that he was a man about to disintegrate. (4) A man who kept himself in one piece by a dedicated devotion to God. But a devotion that was so fragile that he literally had to keep it here, before his face, like a beacon" (14). Ross has now completely transformed the subway man into his own creation. Outside of Ross's perception, the man remains unknowable and wholly other. Ross and, especially, the readers of Spinning into Butter have no access to the subway man's motivations, his history, or his struggles. Furthermore, the man's otherness engenders anxiety for Ross, especially since this episode forms the second time he has seen this man. To make sense of this reappearance, Ross invents a character and writes a play for him. He specifies the details of his costume by describing the man's suit and his struggle to hold on to a fragment of faith.

Just before he describes his encounter with this man, Ross tells Sarah that he had parked his car at a garage and taken the subway to see an exhibit of Cambodian art at the MoMA (13). In other words, Ross, who does not have to live in the city or depend on public transportation ("I've been on the subway precisely four times in the past year" [13]), is confronted by a man who is apparently on the other end of the economic continuum, a subway regular. The man, in his stained cufflinks, exposes Ross's own sense of elitism. Unlike David Foster's "outsider art" (59) or Petra's refugee productions of The Cherry Orchard (12), this man is not art; he is not repackaged poverty for the consumption of privileged museum goers. As an other--that is, an unknowable, unreachable presence--he cannot be enclosed or understood within Ross's framework. Ross's attempt to stage him, therefore, is an attempt to neutralize the threat this man poses. Transforming the scene and the man into a play enables Ross to create a character full of drama and struggle and hope. The Bible verse that Ross chooses, which iterates the words of Jesus shortly before his crucifixion, describes self-sacrifice for a greater good. In fact, the very next verse continues that theme: "Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life" (John 12.25). The man on the subway becomes, in the mind of Ross, a Christ-like figure who, instead of facing an economic or psychological or emotional crisis, is actually laying down his life and choosing to suffer. (5)

As a play within a play, Ross's story presents the themes and issues at stake in Spinning into Butter. When faced with a threatening and unapproachable other, Ross recasts that person as a character in his own play in order to conquer and consume him. This theme of the theater of consumption begins in Gilman's title, an allusion to Helen Bannerman's (in)famous children's book Little Black Sambo. Dean Strauss recounts the story near the end of the play:

   Well, Little Black Sambo had some
   beautiful new clothes and he was
   walking in the jungle, showing them
   off, when a tiger jumped out of the
   bush and threatened to eat him. So,
   Little Black Sambo offered the tiger his
   new coat in exchange for his life, and
   the tiger agreed and took his coat. And
   then another tiger popped up, and so
   on and so on, until the tigers had taken
   all of his clothes. Little Black Sambo
   was going home naked and forlorn
   when he heard a terrible noise coming
   from the forest, and he peeped around
   a tree and saw all of the tigers wearing
   his clothes and arguing over which of
   them was the grandest tiger of all.
   They argued and argued until they got
   so angry that they took off the clothes
   and started chasing each other around
   a tree. [...] They began spinning and
   spinning until they were just a yellow
   blur, and they spun so fast, they spun
   themselves into butter. So Little Black
   Sambo got himself a spoon and
   scooped up the butter and put it on his
   pancakes and ate the tigers up. (90-91)

Like Ross on the subway, Sambo faces a threatening presence. And just as Ross dresses up his subway man to create a character he can understand and dismiss, Sambo dresses up his tigers in his fancy clothes and sets them in motion toward a conflict that ends in their transformation into something consumable. The story describes Sambo as "peeping" at the tigers, suggesting again that theater is the site of transformation from tigers to butter. Sambo provides the tigers with costumes and then takes his seat to watch the show as they chase each other around, spinning themselves into his breakfast. Once they are staged, the threat is eliminated and Sambo can safely resume his existence by incorporating them into his world--that is, literally enfolding them into his flesh ("corp") by eating them.

Traditionally, whites have used the name "Sambo" as a derisive epithet for blacks. (6) The name and image of Sambo, which dates back as far as the late eighteenth century, was solidified in 1899 with the publication of Bannerman's Little Black Sambo. (7) But its crudely drawn and exaggerated figures, although popular for more than half of the twentieth century, eventually became symbols of institutionalized white racism. (8) Sambo came to personify the stereotype of the non-threatening, entertaining "plantation 'darky,'" who had the mind of an "overgrown child" (Boskin 75, 13). Sambo's image is perhaps best illustrated in Clifton's pitch as he tries to sell his grinning Sambo dolls in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man:

      Here you are, ladies and gentlemen,
   Sambo,
      The dancing doll. [...]
      He'll keep you entertained. He'll
   make you weep sweet--Tears
      from laughing. [...]
      What makes him happy, what
   makes him dance,
      This Sambo, this jambo, this high-stepping
   joy boy? (431-32)

Yet it may remain possible to read Sambo as more than an appeasing, childish clown. He did, after all, trick a series of tigers and, after they threatened to eat him, ate them instead. August Wilson, in discussing his one-man show How I Learned What I Learned (which he had originally named Sambo Takes on the World), confirms Sambo's status as a sort of trickster figure: "I am playing Little Black Sambo as a 57-year-old man. [...] Sambo is talented, bright, inventive, all of these admirable qualities in anyone else that we would admire. [...] My idea was to dispel and dispute those negative stereotypes--to resurrect Sambo" (qtd. in Gener).

These characteristics of Sambo are precisely the focus of Lhamon's essay "Chuck Berry and the Sambo Strategy in the 1950s." Although it has been easy, as Lhamon admits, to "scrutinize [Sambo's] demeaning and intentional subjugation, his mincing YASSUHing," we should not "miss the subversion that took place within that context. Before black became beautiful in the sixties, Sambo was sneaky in the fifties" (20). Lhamon argues that in minstrel shows, Sambo frequently got the best of the Interlocutor, who was a "put-on of white men":

   That is, in the minstrel show the
   Sambo figure employed powerlessness
   in order to achieve an ultimate compromised
   victory. Just so, playing out
   the social inheritance of minstrel roles
   on larger stages in the fifties, Sambo
   figures adopted diminishing gestures
   in order to insinuate themselves into
   positions of power that changed the
   white perception of blacks. That was
   and is the Sambo strategy. (20)

Lhamon continues by describing Sambo as "the great pretender, who would make himself whatever "you' in his audiences saw him to be" (21). By employing powerlessness, Sambo exploits his socially, culturally, and economically diminished position to refashion himself. In other words, the Sambo strategy, as outlined by Lhamon, is a theatrical strategy. It allows Sambo to be his own playwright; he re-writes his role and restages the scene in order to critique and mock the power structures in his life. In re-casting the tigers, Sambo produces a theater of consumption; in recasting himself, he initiates the Sambo strategy. Instead of being staged like the man in the subway, Sambo stages himself and thus creates a position of power.

As an author, Sambo parallels the most important character in Spinning into Butter: Simon Brick, the author of a series of racist and threatening notes that he sends to himself. Until that fact is known, though, the campus officials scramble to respond. "We have a dangerous racist in our midst," Dean Strauss exclaims, after they find out that Simon, one of the few black students at Belmont, is receiving racist notes. And they immediately begin formulating a response: "We must make it known, loud and clear, that this sentiment, this trash, is not Belmont" (23). Their plan includes issuing a statement, preparing a response for irate parents, and holding campus forums to discuss racism. Dean Sarah Daniels is even instructed to write "a ten-point plan with specific, concrete suggestions that don't involve a lot of funding but will have a great impact" (65). The result from all of the strategies and planning and writing and discussing is a bureaucratic mayhem that reveals both personal and institutional racism.

When they find out who wrote the notes, Simon is immediately dismissed from the college and from their minds. Dean Strauss, for example, has Simon all figured out: "Ha! I know why! It just hit me. Little Black Sambo. [...] He's a little fox. A little con man" (90-91). In one of Simon's notes, he had referred to himself as "Little Black Sambo" (40), and Strauss makes the connection: if Simon is Sambo, then the Deans are the tigers chasing their own tails. Despite himself, Strauss is right. Or almost right. Simon is not Sambo but has been playing him in a self-scripted drama. Simon is "a little con man" only in the sense that he uses the Sambo strategy to employ powerlessness and stage the racism of the institution and its leaders.

Ross's encounter with the subway man near the beginning of the play precisely illustrates the failure of Belmont in dealing with Simon. Ross encounters an unknowable presence and is able to transform it into a consumable stage production, but the administration, when faced with the threat of Simon, fails where Ross succeeded. If the deans can stage Simon--that is, if they can incorporate him into the framework through which they see the world--they can neutralize the threat he represents and regain control of their environment. (9) And every attempt is made to stage Simon. The members of the administration become playwrights as they plan to produce public forums ostensibly designed to explore racial issues on campus. However, their actual goal is to present a play in which the character Simon confirms Belmont's vision of itself: "We pride ourselves on our inclusiveness" (23). The forums are public events held in theaters, complete with a script and an audience. For example, Dean Kenney advises Dean Strauss on his upcoming speech at one such forum: "Tell them of your record, your impeccable record, and let them see for themselves what sort of man you are. Go and write it out" (47). Yet, despite Strauss's carefully composed script, the forums fail. Patrick, a minority student, complains about the first forum: "The students of color were being talked about like we weren't even there, like we couldn't even talk for ourselves. [...] Basically it felt like I didn't exist" (42). The reason for the failure is Simon's absence. Although he has been the target of the racist notes, he refuses to attend the forums and therefore refuses to play the role written for him by the administration:

STRAUSS. Simon Brick must come to the next forum.

SARAH. So you can yell at him?

STRAUSS. None of that would have happened last night if Simon had been there. (44-45)

And later, Strauss admits, "I need Simon Brick to come to the forum, to tell them I'm not a racist" (46). Without Simon's presence, their drama of self-promotion and self-definition fails. To portray themselves as inclusive and enlightened, they must create and introduce the character "Simon," who is the victim of racism yet understands that the whites in power are doing all they can to protect him. "If he were there," Strauss laments, "they could see that I support him" (45). This "Simon" is knowable, approachable, safe. In a reversal of roles, the administrators attempt yet fail at playing Sambo. Threatened by the menacing presence of Simon, they try to dress him up and show him off and thus transform him into a consumable commodity: namely, a compliant black student who reflects liberal Belmont's mission statement. The problem, however, is that Simon, unlike the tigers, does not cooperate. In Little Black Sambo, the tigers gladly don the little boy's colorful clothes; yet in this case, Simon refuses his costume.

This reading offers an explanation of what is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Spinning into Butter: the absence of Simon. As in the forums staged by the administration, Simon never appears in this play. His presence would only indicate that he has been consumed by those who wish to neutralize his threat. Instead, he remains wholly other, incapable of being scripted, plotted, or consumed. Simon does not merely refuse to participate, but he also actively creates a drama himself. Instead of being an actor on stage, he is a writer, staging a show for the administration. Using the Sambo strategy to make himself into what his audiences want to see, Simon produces a play within the play to reveal the administration's guilt to itself. Like Hamlet's players, Simon constructs a scene designed to "unkennel" the "occulted guilt" of the Belmont officials (Shakespeare 3.2.77). In this scene, Simon, by calling himself various racist epithets, plays blackface to reflect how the administration sees him. They preach inclusion, but Simon knows better and puts on stage what he sees as the institutional and personal racism alive and well at Belmont. Gilman inscribes Simon's role in the play onto his name--Simon Brick. To expose Belmont, he becomes, in a sense, the very message himself; he is the brick he throws through his own window. (10) The cause of the college's grief, in other words, is not the brick that breaks the window of a student's room; it is the Brick who threatens to destroy their institutional drama.

Belmont fails at staging "Simon," the happy minority. Yet Simon succeeds in staging "Simon," the Sambolike caricature of blackness who resides in the minds of the administration. And just as the players in Hamlet cause a stir with their enactment of the King's guilt, Simon's production of the administration's racism conjures mayhem as Belmont officials scramble to spin the story and explain what happened to themselves, to concerned parents, and to their students. Most of the deans, however, fail to learn from Simon's play. The exception is Sarah, who allows herself to be implicated. In the third scene of the second act, she begins her long confession to Ross by revealing her "false conversion" (74), in which she recognizes her complicity as a white liberal yet cannot overcome her true feelings: "I'm fully aware that black people have agency and are responsible and can help themselves, but I think they don't do it because they're lazy and stupid" (74). Although she had studied African American culture and had read Native Son, all she had learned "was how to appreciate black people. The way you might appreciate a painting or a good bottle of Bordeaux. I studied them to figure them out. Like Sanskrit. But that's no different than hating them.... Because when you come face-to-face with a lot of just regular black people, you can't aestheticize them anymore. They're too damn scary" (75). She goes on to describe her attempts to avoid sitting near black men on trains: "And I never said anything.., anything untoward. I was scrupulous. But I still looked at them and thought that they were stupid [...] It was so hard to care because they were so rude" (78).

Not surprisingly, Sarah's shocking self-revelations have become the focus of attention from reviewers and audiences. An especially interesting response to Sarah's outburst is that of Ishmael Reed. In an essay criticizing the racism of mainstream media, he describes the experience of seeing Spinning into Butter:

   I sat there, wondering why the New
   York Times would devote such attention
   to such a clumsy play until some
   ugly racist speeches occurred in the
   middle of the play. [... B]lacks are
   called "lazy, stupid, loud, abusive, and
   stinky." If these images sounded familiar
   to me, it's because they're the typical
   ones you see in the New York Times,
   which associates blacks with welfare,
   drugs, anti-Semitism, misogyny, crime,
   and a host of other social ills. (166-67)

Reed's misreading is instructive. Simon's position as author of his own hate notes does not trivialize attacks against blacks. It stages them. Simon does indeed rely on a tradition of aggressive and explicit racism in composing the notes he sends to himself. And in doing so, he illustrates the history of racism and its current status, specifically echoing the underlying sentiments he senses in the white administration of his school. "They'll tell all," Hamlet says of the players (3.2.133), and Simon likewise tells all and reveals to the administrators their own guilt as racists. He says about himself what they are already thinking. Sarah's outburst confirms Simon's success. She recognizes in his drama her own racism, and Simon's play draws it out of her. That Simon directs these familiar epithets at himself and that Sarah recognizes them in her own feelings are not signs of the racism of Spinning into Butter, but of the racism the play exposes.

By staging himself as a caricature of blackness, Simon employs the Sambo strategy. Although described by Lhamon in terms of 1950's black culture, this tactic continues to be explored in contemporary art, literature, and film. One such example is Spike Lee's Bamboozled, released just one year after the debut of Spinning into Butter. It serves as a useful counterexample here since it explores what happens when Pierre Delacroix, an African American television writer, ultimately fails at using the Sambo strategy to expose the racism of mainstream American culture. Delacroix's boss, Dunwitty, is a white man who prides himself on knowing black people because, as he says, he is married to a black woman and has two biracial children and posters of several black athletes on his office wall. He challenges Delacroix to come up with something different and new. Delacroix, tired of his job and sick of trying to please his boss, develops a show called ManTan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show, which he hopes will be so offensive that he will be fired. His other objective is to satirize the tradition of blackface and racism in American film and television. His plan is outrageous. He creates the characters ManTan and Sleep 'N' Eat from two street performers whom he regularly sees outside his office. As he pitches the idea to Dunwitty, he describes these two characters as "Two real coons. The dusty duo [...] ignorant, dull witted, lazy, and unlucky." (11) The show takes place in a watermelon patch and features a house band called the Alabama Porch Monkeys. ManTan and Sleep 'N' Eat even perform in blackface, although they are themselves black. Like Simon in Spinning into Butter, Delacroix stages the racism that he knows exists. He plays blackface and, in essence, calls himself Sambo (a character who, along with Topsy, Aunt Jemima, and Uncle Ben, appears in the dancing troupe in ManTan's show), echoing the perceived racism in the entertainment business.

Delacroix, however, ultimately fails in his attempt to unmask continuing racism in television. He does not get fired or laughed out of the boardroom. Instead, his idea is accepted, adopted, produced, co-opted, and consumed. Instead of critiquing and unmasking racism, his idea reignites it. ManTan becomes a hit show, and audience members begin showing up wearing the newly popular blackface masks, the word "nigger" begins enjoying renewed widespread use among whites, and familiar and oppressive images of blacks--including lawn jockeys and the "jolly nigger bank"--become pervasive. The important difference between Simon's stratagem and Delacroix's is that Simon does not allow himself to be taken over by the people he is staging. He keeps himself off stage, both literally and figuratively. When the Belmont officials attempt to include him in their staged race forums, Simon refuses. He knows that they have the power to co-opt his critique and use it against him. Delacroix fails precisely because he allows his show to get into the wrong hands: those of the very people he is trying to critique. Once the all-white writing staff and production team take over, ManTan is turned around and Delacroix's ironic minstrelsy becomes an actual minstrelsy. He loses his position as playwright and becomes staged. Instead of dressing up the tigers and eating them, they eat him. (12)

Delacroix's failure is similar to that of Patrick Chibas, the one minority character in Spinning into Butter who does appear on stage. As the play begins, Sarah calls Patrick to her office and offers him a scholarship earmarked for minority students. The problem comes, though, when Sarah begins to fill out the official form. Under the question of racial/ethnic background, Patrick has marked "other":

   SARAH. Okay. I guess I need to
   know, so I can make a recommendation
   to the board, just what "other" is.
   If you don't mind.
      PATRICK. I don't mind. I'm
   Nuyorican. (13)
      SARAH. Nuyorican?
      PATRICK. Yeah.
      SARAH. Huh. Would it be fair for
   me to say, then, that you're, um
   Hispanic? (8-9)

Patrick, at first, resists any generalized categorization of his ethnicity: "What's wrong with Nuyorican?" he asks (9). Sarah proffers an explanation: "Because the members of our scholarship advisory board are ... well ... to be honest, Patrick, they're not culturally sensitive.... I think they tend to see the world in very ... limited terms, as black or white or re ... (She stops herself.) ... racially divided along solid, clearly delineated lines" (9). These "solid, clearly delineated lines" describe the official Belmont stage on which one must appear in order to be recognized. Within this boundary, characters read their lines and become knowable, institutionalized. Sarah attempts to move Patrick onto the stage of categorized ethnicity where he can perform as a minority student and receive official recognition as such. Gilman stages this attempt at staging by opening her play with Patrick's knock on the door and Sarah's invitation, "Come in" (7). In essence, then, the very opening line of Spinning into Butter establishes its theme. Patrick is invited to enter the institutionally sanctioned space--the stage--on which Belmont produces a show that convinces itself it is inclusive and open minded. Sarah's "come in" is also that of Ross to the stranger on the subway as he attempts to move the man into his own frame of reference. It is the deans' invitation to Simon to join them on stage to create a united front and bolster Belmont's image of itself. Unlike Simon, though, Patrick eventually responds to the "come in" and allows himself to be staged by Sarah and the scholarship advisory board. "What about Latino?" Sarah asks. "How 'bout just plain Puerto Rican?" (10). Patrick again insists on defining himself as Nuyorican until Sarah convinces him to change his mind: "I want you to get it. It just seems like a shame to me to leave money sitting around in a bank when it could be doing you some good. You're a remarkably talented student and I think you should be rewarded in a meaningful way" (10). In other words, Sarah again says, "Come in." This time, Patrick acquiesces: "You can put Puerto Rican" (10). Like Delacroix in Bamboozled, Patrick gives up his own resistance. By insisting on Nuyorican, an unrecognized category, Patrick is critiquing the system. But his critique is consumed by Sarah's persistence and offer of money. He, like Delacroix's show, becomes part of the system, moved on stage and used to advance its racist aims.

The effect of his incorporation into the administration's self-authored production becomes clear when Patrick and Sarah meet again near the middle of act one. Patrick goes to Sarah's office to complain about the forum led by Dean Strauss to address racial problems. Even though Patrick was on stage during the forum, he was not allowed to speak. Sarah says, "So essentially, you felt you were being robbed of your agency." But Patrick phrases it a bit more succinctly: "Basically it felt like I didn't exist" (42-43). Since he allowed himself to be staged, he got swallowed up into the show, which was scripted and produced by Belmont officials. Patrick as Patrick no longer exists; he is now only a prop, a minority student strategically placed to dress up the college's image of itself. Yet, visible as a prop, he becomes invisible as a subject. In their final meeting, Patrick loses his temper with Sarah: "I don't want any more compliments! I'm not some genius or something. I'm just whatever I am [...] I'm right here in front of you. Are you even looking at me?" (54). (14) His question is ironic given that he is, in fact, right in front of her--unlike Simon Brick, the center of the play's action, who never appears on stage. Simon's total physical absence then becomes a sort of presence. By not allowing himself to be staged, Simon maintains his position as an independent and unknowable other and thus untouchable by the administration. Patrick, on the other hand, by appearing becomes invisible.

Simon's role in Spinning into Butter, then, is twofold: he resists incorporation into Belmont's drama of self-promotion, and he stages the repressed racism of the administration in the notes he writes to himself. The tool he uses to accomplish these tasks is writing. Simon Brick is an author. But the play is full of other authors as well. The community of Belmont, especially that of its administration, is a scripted community, a theater in which the characters play their parts and read their lines to convince themselves and others that they are who they say they are. What is significant about the mention of so many writers in the play--Ayn Rand, Chekhov, Toni Morrison, Yeats, Rilke, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, and others--is how they and their texts are used. (15) Ross uses the Bible to make sense out of the man on the subway (13); Sarah attacks Ross's equivocation by citing Miriam-Webster's dictionary (17); Native Son evokes Sarah's liberal white guilt (73-74); Sarah explains her racism by critiquing Morrison's Beloved (79); Ross attempts to encourage and extol Sarah by quoting Yeats (82); Jean Toomer is used by Strauss to offer an explanation of Simon's alleged self-hatred (89); and, of course, Bannerman's famous children's story about Sambo gives Strauss his explanation of Simon's behavior (90). In each case, these texts and writers are used as scripts. Gilman's characters--whether shoring up their position as inclusive and open minded or hashing out a relationship gone sour--rely on these texts to speak for them. These characters seem to be in search of an author to instruct their words and thoughts. They choose their roles, pick their texts, and fall into line, exchanging meaningful interpersonal communication with ready-made dialogue. Sarah violently exhibits this tendency when, in anger and frustration, she throws Ross's Rilke book at him (28). Her gesture is the last refuge of the inarticulate.

This tension between verbal inarticulation and the certainty of a written script informs several scenes throughout the play. (16) Perhaps the most obvious is that in which the deans initially find out that Simon has been receiving racist notes. Dean Strauss argues, "We have to be pro-active on this. We must make it known, loud and clear, that this sentiment, this trash, is not Belmont. That Belmont cannot be reduced to this outrageous action. We should issue some sort of statement right away, condemning this" (23). And Dean Kenney begins preparing a finessed statement to read to parents:

   KENNEY. If it leaks out to any of
   the parents and some irate mother calls
   me, I can say, "We've already organized
   a campus meeting in order to
   reduce any stress or obviate any
   adverse reactions...." Something like
   that.
      STRAUSS. Obviate? Will that
   translate?
      KENNEY. Whatever. I'll write it
   out so it sounds fight. (24)

The deans also decide to hold what Kenney calls "this campus forum thingee" (24). When left to their own words, they stumble ("thingee') or obfuscate ("obviate"). (17) This distinction between writing and speaking does not reaffirm a logocentric privileging of the presence of thought over the distance of the pen; rather, Gilman's play juxtaposes individualized thought and speech with institutionally sanctioned texts: for example, speeches at forums, prepared statements for parents, memos, and lists. Such writing becomes a form of political control in which players are directed to produce and regurgitate a script so that the institution can affirm its official position.

For example, in the second half of the play, Dean Kenney demands that Sarah fix this Simon problem with "a ten-point plan with specific, concrete suggestions that don't involve a lot of funding but will have a great impact, and I want you to type it up so that any idiot can understand it. Type it up in a bulleted list" (65). Sarah's list must fit seamlessly into the administration's production of itself, yet it eventually becomes the forum for her tirade against blacks. At first she writes, "One. Stop being stupid," "Two. Move to Vermont," and "Three. Admit defeat" (71). Eventually, though, her list devolves into a chart of the pros and cons of whites" living near black people: "Away: not scary. You forget about their hair" (87). Sarah here perverts the institutional form of thought-control (that is, the memo, the bulleted list, the prepared response) and uses it to mock the possibility that it can convey anything legitimate or sincere. Although instructed to type her list, she writes it in her notebook and thus undercuts the official status of a clean, typed sheet. Finally, she offers her letter of resignation: "I didn't even proofread it. Ha!" (92). By not proofreading, she makes her final act of institutional writing one of rebellion. Instead of insuring clarity and adherence to sanctioned rules of spelling and grammar, Sarah once again subverts the conventions of bureaucratic communication and flaunts it as she finally abandons her role as a Belmont dean.

From the beginning, though, Sarah played that role reluctantly, perhaps because she was miscast. Dean Kenney, at one point, refers to Sarah as "the liaison to the minority students" (47). Sarah, confused, asks her to explain and then learns that the Belmont administration initially thought Sarah herself was black because her application indicated that she was previously working at a mostly-black school. As they did with Patrick and Simon, Belmont officials had tried to add a person of color to its stage production. Instead, Sarah is miscast in the role of minority liaison and becomes a recalcitrant dean. When the others are calling for prepared responses and race forums, Sarah wants to tall first to Simon: "I just ... I feel like we're moving too fast. We should talk to Simon first. What if he doesn't want us to talk about him this way?" Strauss counters: "Why wouldn't he"? (24). Unlike the rest of the deans, Sarah does not seek out Simon because he is needed to fulfill a role in a production but because she wants to see what he wants. Throughout the play, she continually frustrates the plan of the deans by maintaining a concern for Simon as Simon instead of how he can help them construct a unified front. To Sarah, the forums are "cheap penance" (36), and she is the only one who visits Simon to try to understand him. The result is that Sarah and Simon are both cast out of the college. Her connection to him reveals that Sarah is the only Belmont official who recognizes herself in Simon's show. After seeing her own racism played out as an act of aggression against Simon, she can no longer continue to enact her role in the Belmont play: she refuses to use Simon for her own purpose, she encourages the Students for Tolerance to meet unofficially, she transgresses the conventional forms of instructional communication, and--most importantly--she unveils her deep-seated racism. As Ross attempts to pull her back into her role as an inclusive white liberal, he tries to convince Sarah that she has had "an epiphany." But she replies, "No, because I don't believe in shit like that [...] there are no transformational moments" (96-97). Unfortunately, Sarah is right about herself. She resolutely holds onto her illogical and dangerous racist ideas. But if she has had a transformational moment, it is one in which she escapes the disingenuous and hypocritical position as an official character in an institutional play whose only purpose is self-gratification and protection.

If Gilman's play is pessimistic in portraying an administrator finally freed from the constraints of sanctioned speech only to reveal hateful and destructive racism, then she does offer a more hopeful scene near the end of the play. A group of students have begun to meet unofficially to discuss racism on the campus. Their leader, Greg, tells Sarah, "I lied. I told [Dean Strauss] that we were going to cancel the next couple of meetings because of midterms [...] but we had a secret meeting in my room" (102). The students, like Sarah, ignore official protocol to escape the pressures and limitations of authorized space and speech. Their covert meetings accomplish what the official forums could not: "People were really talking. There was yelling and screaming and people were even crying. I mean it. We all really got into it and people were saying things ... things I'd never expect anybody to admit to. But it was also open. You know? The spirit was right" (103). When Sarah asks Greg what they concluded about Simon sending racist notes to himself, Greg responds, "We didn't conclude anything. All we could do was guess. Simon wasn't there" (105). Unlike the administration, the students in this group refuse to write a script for Simon or, for that matter, for themselves. The yelling and crying and improvisational nature of their discussion strongly contrasts the official, scripted nature of the "dialogue" initiated by the institution. If the students have any staged response at all, it is a theater of subversion: unacknowledged by the administration, unscripted, unstaged, and unfinished. Simon's presence is not needed or even requested. He is left offstage and is able, therefore, to maintain control over his own identity instead of being forced to play a role in Belmont's theater of consumption.

Works Cited

Bannerman, Helen. The Story of Little Black Sambo. London: Grant Richards, 1899.

Boskin, Joseph. Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Charles, Michael Ray. "A Conversation." Charles, Michael Ray Charles 8-15.

--. Michael Ray Charles. New York: Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 1998.

Dorn, Patrick. "'Butter' Reveals Academicians' True Colors." 22 Jan. 2002. Daily Camera. 28 Mar. 2002. <http://www.thedailycamera.com/entertainment/theater-/22.pbutt.html>.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1947. New York: Vintage, 1995.

Garner, Stanton B., Jr. "Framing the Classroom: Pedagogy, Power, Oleanna." Theatre Topics 10.1 (2000): 39-52.

Gener, Randy. "Salvation in the City of Bones." No longer accessible. Theatre Communications

Group. 27 July 2004 <http://www.tcg.org/am_theatre/at_articles/At_volume_20/MayJune03/ at_web5603_marainey.html>.

Gilman, Rebecca. Boy Gets Girl. New York: Faber, 2000.

--. Blue Surge. New York: Faber, 2001.

--. The Glory of Living. New York: Faber, 2001.

--. Spinning Into Butter. New York: Faber, 2000.

Hay, Elizabeth. Sambo Sahib: The Story of Little Black Sambo and Helen Bannerman. Edinburgh, Scotland: Harris, 1981.

Holman, Curt. "Spin Control." 18 May 2001. Creative Loafing. 28 Mar. 2002.<http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/ 2001-04-18/arts_theater.html>.

Jones, Chris. "A Beginner's Guide to Rebecca Gilman." American Theatre Apr. 2000: 26-30.

Jones, LeRoi. Dutchman. 1964. The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris. New York: Thunder's Mouth, 2000. 76-99.

Kalb, Jonathan. "Spinning Into Butter, By Rebecca Gilman." 2 Aug. 2000. New York Press 13.31. 28 Mar. 2002. <http://www.nypress.com/13/31/theater/theater.cfm>.

Kaufman, Joanne. "She Said What?" New York 10 July 2000: 39.

Lee, Spike, dir. Bamboozled. 2000. New Line Cinema, 2000.

Lhamon, W. T., Jr. "Chuck Berry and the Sambo Strategy in the 1950s." Studies in Popular Culture 12.2 (1989): 20-29.

Reed, Ishmael. Another Day on the Front. New York: Basic, 2003.

"The Season's" American Theatre Oct. 2001: 86.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. 1602. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Ed. Alfred Harbage. New York: Penguin, 1969. 1107-35.

Steyn, Mark. "Policy Paper Plays." New Criterion Apr. 2001: 38-43.

Weber, Bruce. "Drama Confronts a Very Familiar Bias." New York Times 16 June 1999: E1.

Yuill, Phyllis J. Little Black Sambo: A Closer Look. New York: Council on Interracial Books for Children, 1976.

Zoglin, Richard. "The Date from Hell." Rev. of Boy Gets Girl. Time 10 Apr. 2000: 132.

Notes

The author would like to thank Thomas Adler for his support and helpful suggestions, Paul Shields for his careful and insightful readings of several drafts of this essay, and Susan Gilmore and the participants of the 2003 NEMLA panel on American women playwrights for allowing him to work out some early ideas on Gilman's play.

(1.) For more comparisons between Spinning into Butter and Oleanna, see Dorn, Garner, Holman, and Chris Jones.

(2.) For more on audience responses to the play, see Weber.

(3.) One is reminded here of another controversial and confrontational play about race: LeRoi Jones's Dutchman, in which the action occurs "In the flying underbelly of the city. Steaming hot, and summer on top, outside. Underground. The subway heaped in modern myth" (76).

(4.) Because Gilman uses ellipses through her play, all added ellipses will be bracketed.

(5.) Ross furthers the connection to Christ by saying that the last time he remembers seeing this man was at Christmas.

(6.) For an analysis and history of the name "Sambo," see Yuill 20-23 and the second chapter of Boskin.

(7.) Little Black Sambo went through four editions and sold 21,000 copies in its first year alone and went on to be translated in multiple languages. It sold extremely well in multiple editions up through the 1970s. For more on the history and reception of Bannerman and Little Black Sambo, see Hay and Yuill.

(8.) Hay's history of the book and its creator defends Bannerman and blames the racism associated with Little Black Sambo on bastard editions of her book that distort her original figures and transplant her story into the American South.

(9.) This image is echoed in Gilman's play Boy Gets Girl, in which Theresa works for a magazine called The World. Their logo is a globe within a window frame (39). Perhaps the same logo would apply to Belmont since its administration strives to contain its world within a frame or, in other words, on a stage.

(10.) His name also connects him to another character in Spinning into Butter who does not appear on stage: Petra. "Petra" is a form of the Latin Petrus, which is a translation of the Aramaic Kipha and means rock or, perhaps, brick. Etymologically, then, Simon Brick also shares his name with the apostle Simon Peter.

(11.) I have taken the liberty of informally transcribing the dialogue of the film based on my aural impressions.

(12.) The artist Michael Ray Charles is listed as a visual consultant for Lee's Bamboozled, and the Sambo strategy is an important part of his work, especially the piece (Forever Free) Beware, which shows a Sambo-looking child (Michael Ray Charles 26), who, as Charles himself describes, "appears to be whistling on its merry way, not even staring at the viewer. It's almost something that's not going to harm you because it's not interested in you" ("A Conversation" 11). Yet the word "Beware," in large letters, suggests the threat potentially contained in such an innocent-looking image.

(13.) "Nuyorican" is a combination of "New York" and "Puerto Rican" and describes Puerto Rican citizens of New York.

(14.) Patrick's resistance to Sarah here parallels that of Theresa in Boy Gets Girl, who resists being used as an example in her colleague's article on male/female relationships: "I'm not theoretical. I'm real" (80).

(15.) Similarly, in Gilman's play Boy Gets Girl, one runs across Edith Wharton, Eugene Debs, Theodore Dreiser, Paul Dresser, William Dean Howells, William Styron, and Arthur Miller.

(16.) This tension persists throughout Gilman's other plays as well. The very title of her play Blue Surge, for example, results from a confusion between "serge" and its homonym "surge" (65-66).

(17.) The words thing and thingee actually appear several times throughout the play. See pp. 14, 15, 17, 24, 26, 27, 29, 34, 49, 40, and 41. Gilman's concern with the inarticulate speech of her characters strengthens the noted connection between her plays and David Mamet's.

Geoffrey Stacks teaches English at the University of Denver.