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THEATERMANIA: In the last few years, you've gone from relative obscurity to become a much-talked-about playwright. How has that affected the way you approach your writing?
GILMAN: In terms of when I would sit down and write a play, I think I was much happier when nobody knew who I was. I feel like people expect everything that comes off the pen now to be of a certain quality. Everybody thinks The Glory of Living was the first play I ever wrote; nobody saw the 15 plays I wrote before that.
TM: Is Spinning Into Butter your first play produced in New York?
GILMAN: I had a couple of really small productions ages ago at a theater called Next Stage Company. One was called Little Eva Takes a Trip. The other was The Adventures of Bobby and Vaughan. They were plays I wrote in graduate school. But [Spinning] is definitely my first Equity production in New York.
TM: What are the differences between doing the show in Chicago and doing it in New York?
GILMAN: I don't see a particular difference. The people I worked with in both places are terrific. 
TM: There was a lot of hype prior to the play's New York opening. How do you think that affected its critical reception?
GILMAN: I don't know. To be honest, I don't read reviews. But I do always worry. The attention the play got in Chicago was so surprising to me. I was overwhelmed by it. I did caution people--even people writing preview articles--that I really hoped expectations wouldn't just be out of this world. It's a play! It's not anything more than that.
TM: Well, I found it fascinating, and I'm speaking as both a person of color and someone who's going into teaching.
GILMAN: Oh, really?
TM: It certainly mirrors experiences I've had at universities. What was your college life like?
GILMAN: It was really long; I went to four different universities or colleges altogether. I transferred from Middlebury College [in Vermont] to Birmingham Southern College, where I graduated. Then I went to graduate school in English at the University of Virginia because I thought I wanted to be a professor. That lasted about a year! [laughs] When I got there, I realized what I wanted to do was write. I should have been reading literary theory; instead, I was taking playwriting classes. So I got my masters there, and then I immediately started the playwriting program at the University of Iowa.
TM: Did you draw from your own personal experiences of academic life for Spinning Into Butter?
GILMAN: I did. I know and love lots of people who teach. Academics can be an easy target, and I feel badly about that. But at the same time, I'd be around some professor and I'd just go, "Oh, my God, nobody would believe that if I put it down on paper." [laughs] There are some really great people who teach, and there are people who let it consume them. So it was based a little bit on my experience as a student and on my experience teaching English and playwriting.
TM: What changes did you make to the play for the New York production?
GILMAN: I tried to clarify some of the characters' motivations. I worked hard on the Nuyorican student, because there was some confusion in Chicago as to whether he was just a reactionary angry young man or not, which is not what I intended. I wanted you to see that he was somebody who, by everyone else's insensitivity, got pushed into taking a stand about things. He wasn't the kind of person that you'd just poke in the wrong way and he turns around screaming. So I worked on that. Then there was a structural problem after Sarah's monologue. It seemed to feel like the climax, even though I didn't know that when I wrote it.
TM: But that's what everyone reacted to.
GILMAN: Yeah, and there was still quite a bit of play after that which had to be streamlined, so basically we wouldn't have a 20-minute denouement.
