The ivory tower is overrun with moral moss in Spinning into Butter. Rebecca Gilman’s fearless play premiered in Chicago in 1999, won the Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, and is now receiving a finely tuned production at the Theatre Cooperative. Set at a New England college where a racial incident has occurred, the work rips down the rigid strictures of political correctness that buttress the establishment, thereby unleashing the characters’ unspoken thoughts about race.

Sarah Daniels is a new dean at Belmont, a cozy Vermont liberal-arts college. (Gilman went to Middlebury.) The administration prides itself on inclusiveness, but that’s just lip service, since there’s not much diversity at a party school that draws students because of its ski-country locale. The play opens with Sarah offering a scholarship to a student of color. Only catch: can she classify his race in broader terms than " Nuyorican? " This is Gilman’s way of kindling the embers of racial tension, which flare up across campus when a black student receives hate notes.

We never meet the victim, and that makes Spinning a drama less about the evils of racism than about how liberals deal with white guilt — or fail to. The college administrators are more concerned with whether their comments can indict them as racists and how they can bolster their own images (and egos) than they are with the climate on campus. Suspicious of the " cheap penance " offered by hoky campus-wide events and cynical toward students like the frat boy who seeks support for " Students for Tolerance against Hate, " Sarah looks inward to examine the basis of her own attitudes.

Korinne T. Hertz plays Sarah with icy austerity in the first act, even as the character works through a floundering relationship with Ross, an art-history professor whom David Rabinow portrays with bookish charm. The couple’s chemistry is a bit contrived, but Ross serves a necessary role: he’s the only one with whom Sarah can be more personal than professional and air her guilty thoughts. Hertz pulls off the revelatory eruption, down to the declaration of hate for Toni Morrison, like a cathartic release.

Director Lesley Chapman underscores the isolation of academe, thus blaming it for lack of productive dialogue. The play takes place entirely in Sarah’s office, and characters stare out a window at the campus they’re disconnected from. On Alicia Gregoire’s stately yet sterile set, Chapman keeps actors far apart, even when they speak intimately.

Gilman’s subject could easily be the stuff of tepid reflection on the curses of the privileged class, but she’s too skilled a craftsperson. She is candid about society’s dark issues in a way that brings to mind her contemporary Neil LaBute. Her comet-quick style, tart one-liners, and plot surprises also suggest David Mamet. A Chicago-based writer who has received favorable national attention, Gilman has not been done here; Theatre Cooperative deserves credit for taking her on.

The play’s name comes from the folk tale of Little Black Sambo, who offers pieces of his clothing in exchange for his life each time he is ambushed by a tiger. Arguing over who looks the grandest, the beasts give chase around the tree in which he’s taken refuge, moving so quickly that they spin themselves into melted butter. The parallel gives a satiric edge to Gilman’s characters’ academic theorizing and surfacy solutions. Fred Robbins best captures the farcical aspect, playing a tweed-clad humanities-department chair as a caricature of academic pomposity. When Lida McGirr’s chirpy yet cutthroat Catherine, the elder dean, demands that Sarah make a bullet-point list on how to solve racism, Sarah matches the task’s ridiculousness with recommendations like " Don’t be stupid. " It’s as if the basic tenets of human decency had to be spelled out to those on institutional high.

Spinning into Butter is churned with emotional force. It presents a touchy issue and takes a stand without being preachy. It works through arguments and encourages us to work along with it, asking the same questions about ourselves that we ask about the characters. In that sense, the play positions Gilman as an artist in the political-theater tradition more commonly associated with European dramatists from Brecht to Václav Havel. In an age when another institution, the corporation, rushes for quick fixes for deep-rooted problems, Gilman reaffirms that there’s no such thing as a pat solution.