Show and Tell Post 2: M. Butterfly

For my second Show and Tell post I chose M. Butterfly, which I read in my theatre history class. M. Butterfly was written by David Henry Hwang. It was first premiered at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on Broadway on the 20^th of March in 1988. It was directed by John Dexter with John Lithgow and DB Wong playing the two main characters at the start of the seven hundred and seventy-seven performances run.  This play is inspired by both the opera Madame Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini and the loosely based on true story of the French diplomat, Bernard Boursicot, who had a relationship with a Chinese spy, Shi Pei Pu, who masqueraded as a female opera singer.

M. Butterfly starts off with Rene Gallimard, the French Diplomat, in his prison cell, talking about how he was in love with the “Perfect Woman.” He talks about how he is now famous and how boring his life was before we started working at the French embassy in China. That was when he met and fell in love with Song Lilling, an opera singer who was performing a piece from his favorite opera, Madame Butterfly. Song Lilling is able to entrap Gallimard and they start to have an affair with gives Gallimard the adventure and power he craves while Song is able to get information from Gallimard that the Chinese government wants. But after several years, Gallimard is sent back to France, and Song Lilling is forced to follow him because her government will not pay for her to stay. The couple are together for twenty years before it is found out that not only is Song Lilling a Chinese spy, but she was actually a male. Song Lilling is able to completely fool Gallimard all those years that Gallimard is unable to comprehend the truth and decides to keep the fantasy of the perfect woman alive in his head, ending his life in a Japanese suicide ritual.

One of the dramaturgical choices Hwang had made was how closely he tied the plot of this play to Madame Butterfly. The opera is not just a play that the characters in the piece performs or likes, there is both an overt and a subtle connection between the two productions. The more overt one would be that Song Lilling emulated Madame Butterfly to gain the trust and affection of Gallimard to gain the information his government needed. He allowed Gallimard to play the part of Pinkerton and allow him to feel the power that the character in the opera had over his Butterfly. But the subtlety of it is that, in truth, Gallimard is Madame Butterfly, that he allows his love for the ‘Perfect Woman’ to trap him in a lie for all those years. Gallimard is the poor wife stuck while her husband abandons her. It is Gallimard stuck in the prison while Song Lilling goes free. The end proves this by showing Gallimard dying the same way Madame Butterfly did in the opera.

Another choice I found interesting was how Hwang never really spelled it out in the play that Song Lilling was really a man, but had left a lot of clues. The first clue, was of course, was the playwright’s notes, which states that this play was loosely based on the events between the French Diplomat and the male Chinese opera singer/spy. Though, I am unsure if that was just a part of my textbook or if it was shown to the audience via the play program. But other clues are that Song never allowed Gallimard to never see him naked and that Comrade Chin kept on talking about dishonor and lack of understanding for homosexuals and the fact that he only brought the same upon himself. It wasn’t until the end of the second act and the beginning of the third that the audience is told what has been only hinted before, that the woman Gallimard has been in love with has been a man this whole time.

 

Source: www.ibdb.com/production.php?id=4497