Alliance Rep offers Rebecca Gilman’s provocative drama about racial hatred, set on a Vermont college campus.
By: Stuart Duncan
Alliance Repertory has been a theater company in search of a home base far too long. It has operated on second stages around the area, even in the basement of a hotel in New Brunswick condemned to the wrecker’s ball. Happily it has found a permanent home at the Brooks Arts Center in Bound Brook.
With the next-door warehouse still months away from construction, the stage and audience are both confined to the mainstage lobby area which, in turn, demands ingenuity from actors and directors. The latest offering Rebecca Gilman’s provocative drama of campus life in almost lily-white Vermont as it confronts racial hatred, "Spinning Into Butter" presents blistering concepts in an up-close-and-personal setting.
It is the perfect project for director Michael Driscoll who has developed a stunning reputation for matching actors to roles ideally suited to their talents, and for courageously taking on difficult themes that disturb the mind and leave welts on the soul.
Spinning Into Butter (the title refers to an image in a children’s story about Little Black Sambo) revolves around Sarah Daniels, an acknowledged liberal dean of students at a school with Establishment ties and mindset. She has been hired for her empathetic concerns for minority students, but hides personal fears. When one of the college’s few black students begins receiving hate mail, Sarah’s commitment is challenged, as indeed are her colleagues. The show premiered at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and later at Lincoln Center Theater in New York.
Director Driscoll has found a few freshmen of his own to join the cast of veterans. Daniel Utset plays a Hispanic student with seething intensity. Darren Ross is a well-intentioned student with "do-good" instincts who finds himself more and more disillusioned.
Art Hickey, who has appeared on local stages for 20 years, makes his Alliance Rep debut as a college security guard. Noreen Farley, who has done most of her work on the West Coast films and commercials as well as regional theater also is new to the company.
Another veteran of area stages, Jeff Maschi, is a professor and (semi) love interest. Jim Morgan, in his fifth Alliance Rep show, portrays the haughty dean of the faculty with polished ease.
But the evening clearly belongs to Angela Della Ventura as Sarah. She brings to the role a lovely aura of vulnerability. Playwright Gilman makes the mistake many new writers do of overwriting the message. In particular, right in the middle of act two, everything stops while we must listen to four full pages of the playwright’s thoughts once more after we all have heard them and digested them in the 90 minutes leading up to the moment. Miss Ventura handles the dialogue with aplomb.
But this minor quibble aside, Spinning Into Butter is an important work by a playwright from whom much can be expected in the future.
Spinning Into Butter continues at the Brook Arts Center, 10 Hamilton St., Bound Brook, through March 1. Performances: Thurs.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m. Tickets cost $15. For information, call (732) 469-7700. On the Web: www.alliancerep.org and www.brookarts.org

