is society responsible for the demons it produces? At what point do we become responsible for our own actions? What happens to a society when its children are neglected? In an approach that would become typical of Gilman, these question are not answered, but rather asked firmly and with a careful eye on personal consequences.

Spinning into Butter

This Gilman play is her most commercially successful as well as her most produced. Responsible for launching her national popularity, the play is an examination of hidden racism amidst the liberal white environment of a private East Coast college campus. Her inspiration in writing this play came mostly from her own experiences as a student at Middlebury College in Vermont. The plot of Spinning into Butter, which involves racist threats being made at a mostly white campus and the revelation that the target of the threats and the person making them are the same African American student, is based on an actual incident that took place while Gilman was attending Middlebury. Like Gilman herself, the central character of Sarah, a school official transplanted to the East Coast from Chicago, experiences difficulty fitting in at Middlebury.

The play, in a sort of bait-and-switch fashion, establishes Sarah as a clearly sympathetic character before suddenly exposing her hidden racism. Sarah and her colleagues at the predominantly white Belmont find themselves at the center of a debate about race when an African American student—Simon Brick—becomes the victim of racist threats. At the outset of the play, Brick brings to school officials some threatening notes that he found taped to his door and a brick that was thrown through his window. The incident creates an uproar among Belmont’s liberal administration, who systematically and bureaucratically proceed to deal with the problem. By the end of the play, Brick has admitted to writing the notes himself, but not before the administration has managed to alienate the school’s minority population in their series of public forums.

The title reference is to the children’s story “Little Black Sambo,” in which a boy baits a group of prowling tigers until they fall into a frenzy and spin themselves into butter. The story resonates with the play in that, though the original threat of racism turned out to be imaginary, the frenzied efforts of the members of the administration to cover up or correct the problem eventually reveal their misunderstanding of their own feelings. A gripping monologue in the second act reveals Sarah’s reluctant racism, feelings she developed while working at a minority school before moving to Belmont.

The play focused on reaching an audience of seemingly enlightened white liberals, and perhaps because of this, many African American theatergoers found it difficult to watch. Critical responses either lauded Gilman for not backing down from difficult realities or derided her for not including a single African American character in a play about racism. The play seems to suggest that public dialogue about racism is rarely truthful or productive; however, when Spinning into Butter premiered, the theater group held a post-play discussion on racism with the audience.

Boy Gets Girl

Influenced by Gilman’s feminist sensibility, this exploration of the social forces behind stalkers is recognized as one of her finest pieces of narrative playwriting. Centered around magazine executive Theresa and a blind date that goes from awkward to pushy to downright violent, Boy Gets Girl resembles the 1987 film Fatal Attraction, which brought attention to this form of stalking. Boy Gets Girl, unlike most of its counterparts on the screen, goes deeper into the social forces at work in violent male obsession. Gilman’s play does not place the blame in obvious hands; rather, it explores the habits of the criminal, the habits of the victim, and the habits of those around her in its comprehensive look at female objectification.

In the world of Boy Gets Girl, stalking, obsession, and violence are not simply the crazed acts of a lone criminal; rather, they are the unfortunate combination of a variety of social shortcomings. Gilman embodies her indictment of objectified female beauty in the character of Les Kennkat—a Russ Meyer-style filmmaker and connoisseur of the female breast. Although Kennkat claims to be celebrating the female form, the play argues that this type of glorification is as much a form of dehumanization as anything else and is therefore to be abhorred as objectification.

Rather than portray women as the helpless victims of crimes beyond their control, Gilman explores Theresa’s role in the situation as co-conspirator and product of social conditioning. The play focuses on Theresa’s initial reluctance to go on the blind date and her desire to please others. Eager to avoid offense, Theresa initially ignores or even caters to Tony’s bizarre behavior, until the roller coaster has gained too much momentum. The play does not so much blame the victim as analyze her role in the odd social dance of stalker and victim. Ultimately, Gilman advocates an absolute truthfulness in human interaction. All parties—Tony, Theresa, her boss, and her secretary—are eventually guilty of dehumanizing themselves and one another and of hedging the truth to preserve the status quo.