P4M NON-REVIEW: SPINNING INTO BUTTER PLAYS TO AN AGED, UNICULTURAL AUDIENCE AT LINCOLN CENTER
By now, you've probably heard of this play, Spinning Into Butter, in which four, white administrators of a conservative Vermont college display, comically but touchingly, their varying brands of racism-speaking-with-the-voice-of-not- deeply-enough-examined liberalism. A Nuyorican guy gets promised a scholarship if he lists himself as "Hispanic" on the application form; a black guy gets some hate shit posted on his dorm door; and the drama takes off from there.
A hit in Chicago, where it premiered last year, Spinning Into Butter has been in previews at Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theater and opens officially there tonight. It's tightly acted by a great cast and deftly marries a righteous political agenda with the emotional requirements of good theater. In fact, Spinning Into Butter is just the sort of moving issue-play that the Pulitzer committee loves. But as we pulled our attention away from the action onstage for a moment during the second act and surveyed the distinctly aged and largely uni-cultural audience (all of whom were sitting in $50 seats), we couldn't help noticing the same problem we addressed last week in our "anti-review" of Bill T. Jones's recent Lincoln Center appearance: the structural smugness of big arts institutions.
Yup. They didn't give us review tickets for this one, either-- because all of Lincoln Center's marketing and publicity efforts evidently go toward selling out the house to people who can afford it, and very little go toward expanding the critical context for the artist's work and widening the audience for it. We doubt that too many other urban media outlets got comps, either. (We did see some friends at the performance who review theater for mainstream publications and we'll try to get a review for you from one of them, since, again, the play was terrific and you should definitely try to see it.) It's great that Lincoln Center's target audience gets to see a play depicting many of its favorite forms of racism, but are Lincoln Center Theater co-directors Andre Bishop and Bernard Gersten absolutely precluding the possibility of a race-driven drama that speaks to, and is marketed to, everyone?
A hit in Chicago, where it premiered last year, Spinning Into Butter has been in previews at Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theater and opens officially there tonight. It's tightly acted by a great cast and deftly marries a righteous political agenda with the emotional requirements of good theater. In fact, Spinning Into Butter is just the sort of moving issue-play that the Pulitzer committee loves. But as we pulled our attention away from the action onstage for a moment during the second act and surveyed the distinctly aged and largely uni-cultural audience (all of whom were sitting in $50 seats), we couldn't help noticing the same problem we addressed last week in our "anti-review" of Bill T. Jones's recent Lincoln Center appearance: the structural smugness of big arts institutions.
Yup. They didn't give us review tickets for this one, either-- because all of Lincoln Center's marketing and publicity efforts evidently go toward selling out the house to people who can afford it, and very little go toward expanding the critical context for the artist's work and widening the audience for it. We doubt that too many other urban media outlets got comps, either. (We did see some friends at the performance who review theater for mainstream publications and we'll try to get a review for you from one of them, since, again, the play was terrific and you should definitely try to see it.) It's great that Lincoln Center's target audience gets to see a play depicting many of its favorite forms of racism, but are Lincoln Center Theater co-directors Andre Bishop and Bernard Gersten absolutely precluding the possibility of a race-driven drama that speaks to, and is marketed to, everyone?
posted by Lucia Toledo at 9:48 AM
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