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It hasn't been a good couple of months for peace in the Tampa Bay area.
I mean a particular kind of peace: between blacks and whites.
In December, a public art display in St. Petersburg on the theme of "Coexistence" was vandalized.
In January, a white teenager dropped a noose around the neck of a black 14-year-old in Largo.
The same month, a biracial girl was suspended from Tarpon Spring High School after she circulated a petition asking that the Confederate flag and other symbols she considered offensive be banned from campus.
And in early February, some white students ran the Confederate flag up the pole outside Hudson High School in Pasco County.
Against the backdrop of those events comes a play performed at American Stage in St. Petersburg: Spinning into Butter. Put in its baldest terms, the play by white prize-winning playwright Rebecca Gilman is about the racial biases of whites and is meant, I think, chiefly for a white audience.
When I attended recently, there were only a few black people in the 144-seat audience. And there wasn't a single black in the cast.
The action focuses on what happens when the supposedly liberal officials of a Vermont college are faced with acts that appear to have been perpetrated by somebody white against against one of the school's few black students.
The school officials run in circles. They fall all over themselves, making sterile declarations about race, saying what they think they are supposed to say, whether or not they believe it.
Some in the cast - and this is no accident - go on and on about the black student, about what he's like and what he feels, without ever bothering to meet him. The student is a powerful off-stage presence. He eventually is kicked out of school; it's as though the whites can't bear to be reminded of the conflict he represents.
The one school administrator who knows the student is dean Sarah Daniels. She is the sort of person who tries, naively, to save the world. She once worked at an all-black college in Chicago, but fled to this all-white school far from the demands of the big city. She was fleeing from her own thinking, she admits in the second act. In an emotional, uncomfortable confession, Daniels unloads her racist thoughts to the audiences.
Even though most of her students in Chicago had been hard-working and dedicated, Daniels could focus only on those few who weren't. They frightened and angered her. They came to represent everyone black she knew. She admits that while in Chicago, she had a pecking order for choosing subway seatmates; black men always came last. Her dislikes range from black people's hair to the works of Nobel prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison.
I've probably given away too much of Spinning into Butter. But I tell you because the play is the first time I've seen made plain the internal struggle some whites face with racism. It's the first time I've seen whites talk openly of their fear of the subject.
No matter how we think we believe, if we're white, we're infected with this disease. It finally defeats do-gooding Daniels; just as she quit her job in Chicago, she quits in Vermont.
Some black people don't handle this issue any better. Spinning into Butter gets into that, too.
I've been a journalist for 30 years. Straight facts are supposed to always reveal the "truth" of a situation, but I've come to learn there are inevitable limits to what facts deliver. Facts will tell you the time and date of an event, even some of the words people utter in the middle of it. But facts fail when it comes to capturing the feel of an event or the emotions that entangle people. That's why we have fiction, art and drama such as Spinning into Butter.
The kids in Tarpon Springs, Hudson and Largo should see it. They're certainly old enough, and it sounds like they need it.
So do the rest of us, and somehow, audiences know that. Spinning into Butter has been such a success that its run has been extended a week, through Sunday. See for yourself. If you're anything like me, the play will make you squirm.
- Mary Jo Melone can be reached at mjmelone@sptimes.com or 813 226-3402.