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

Comment Post index

http://2130coryvincent.blogspot.com/2013/04/noise-about-noises-off.html?showComment=1365872824665#c3999352780904772545

http://garrettstheater.blogspot.com/2013/04/detroit.html?showComment=1365873127152#c2174424565998567336

http://emilielegethtr2130blog.blogspot.com/2013/04/buried-child.html?showComment=1365873745126#c3501847290314818474

http://thtr2130sh.blogspot.com/2013/04/glass-of-water.html?showComment=1365873346724#c2145843935191635840

http://garrettstheater.blogspot.com/2013/04/water-by-spoonful.html?showComment=1365874305740#c5640078511550907837

http://emilielegethtr2130blog.blogspot.com/2013/04/water-by-spoonful-hudges.html?showComment=1365874600150#c5530464115214477529

 

Noises Off

I think great motif for Michael Frayn's Noises Off would be the old adage of Murphy's Law, "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." In this farce, we see what is supposed to be a normal production start spiraling out of control, from something as minor as Brooke losing her contact to the multiple love triangles that end up completely unending a performance. Almost at every turn, something that should just happen naturally and melodically turns into a complete disaster. And while it's a given that all productions would have some sort of mess up or accident (such as I once stepped on a fellow actor's prop glasses after having problems with my own contacts right before the lights went up), this one shows Murphy's Law to the extreme. Frayn has the actors miss lines, skip queues, have wardrobe malfunctions, and completely allow their personal problems to bleed out into the production that ends with them having to drag the curtain down.

I think a great tag line would be the line Lloyd says in the first act. “That’s farce. That’s the theatre. That’s life!” Not only because the play itself is a farce, but it this play shows what can go wrong in a production, and that the key is that this is life, and with life, you just have to go on. That things will go crazy and chaotic, and you just have to accept it and move on. Just because they are putting up a production, doesn’t mean life has stopped. The actors can try to put aside their emotions and their problems, but they are but human, and can only go so far. And though they allowed their personal problems to bleed into their performance, none of them actually stopped trying to put it on. And that what being in theatre involves, to keep on going even though you messed up.

 

Detroit

In this play, I think a great phrase to describe it is "Detroit is not a city, it's a lifestyle". There is a news article I read online that is entitled "Letters: Life in Detroit--distressed but not beyond hope." It talks about how "this once great city" is dying, that it is a "shell" of it's former glory. The neighborhoods are decrepit and broken down, the once sparkly houses turned to seed. And the city will not or cannot help. This mimics not only the neighborhood that the two couples live in, but the couples themselves, or at least each individual character. Frank, at the end of the play, talks about the former glory of the neighborhood, how everyone knew everyone, and how the houses are falling apart. And even with the "fancified" houses, that he could understand why those in the crumbling houses would be wary of asking for help from the richer people. The neighborhood itself is a Detroit neighborhood, even if it wasn't really in Detroit. And as far as the characters are concerned, it is about the human condition, to be downtrodden but still with hope. It is almost like the characters are Detroit, that they were once good and great, but have been neglected by those around them and are falling into decay, especially Kenny/Roger. His mother moved away, not wanting to be apart of the family, and he got into trouble but it seems no one wanted to help him. So he kept on getting into more and more trouble. But it finally appears that he wanted to try to make a new life. Get a new name, a new place to live, and someone who he can share his new life with. And with Mary and Ben, they were lonely and forgotten, in their little house, when Shannon and Kenny came by and opened their world for them. And while that friendship turned disastrous, the ending was not all that bad. They may have lost their house, but it opened doors for the couple that they probably would not have thought of before. They plan to go to England and start their new life. They are distress...but not beyond hope.

http://www.freep.com/article/20120527/OPINION04/205270482/Letters-Life-in-Detroit-distressed-but-not-beyond-hope

Water by the Spoonful

The scene I think is a pivotal moment in the play that has the realities interacting is the scene where Elliot and Yaz find Odessa's computer and starts talking to Orangutan on the computer. Prior to that, the only time the real life is interactive and not just glimpse of the real world and online world is when Odessa makes it. This time it is two worlds interacting without the middle person. When Elliot and Yaz comes into his biological mother's apartment to grab things to pawn off to get her sister some flowers for her funeral, they come across Odessa's website and Elliot, who is pissed off with his mother, tries to start things on her website, but when Orangutan outs his own addiction to pain medication. Obviously upset and angry, Elliot takes his anger out at Orangutan and then unplugs his mother's computer to sell it. When Yaz tries to get answers from him, having not know of his addiction, but Elliot deflects and pleads with her to let it go, which she does.

In this scene and the scene before, we saw the contempt Elliot had with his mother and people who are addicted in general, so to finally have the information out that he himself is an addict is jarring but somehow understandable. Elliot is in clear denial of his own problems and chooses instead to manifest his feelings of his own addiction upon his mother, who had hurt him in the past with her own addiction. He can't face what he has become so he tries to push off his guilt and turns it into anger at his mother. He hates what his mother's addiction did to her and his family, especially his sister. To have Elliot be confronted about his own addiction by another recovering addict while the realities intersect creates a stronger tie between the two worlds.

Buried Child

In Buried Child by Sam Sheppard, there are some realism aspects of this play, but it does not follow the traditional path of realism. There are some aspects that does not match the criteria, such as the lack of dramatic irony. The audience finds out the secrets when the other characters find out the secrets. Such as the secret of the dead baby. It is hinted, which shows some form of ambiguity (more on that a little later), but we do not know the real truth until the very end when Tilden comes from the back yard (or what we assume is the back yard) cradling a skeletal baby in his arms. The facts of this play that comes out is something that a reader or a watcher has to read/see a second time to capture all of the information that is not clearly thrown out there. The irony is hard to see because there is no clear distinction between reality and appearance. As I said before, everything that we do find out is found at the end, and still we don't know everything when it comes to the secrets or mysteries of this play.

A lot of things are left to ambiguity, such as what happened in New Mexico with Tilden, who was really the father of the dead baby(though it is implied that Tilden was the father), who really was Vince, just to name a few. There is some ambiguity that is revealed at the end, such as if there really was a buried child (there was.)

A bit of complexity would be Vince. It isn't until the end that he is remembered by his grandmother, but through out the play we (the audience) wonder if he was just as crazy as the rest of them appeared to be. Another complexity would be Bradley, who appeared all big and bad when he intimidates Shelly, but becomes a weak and pathetic child when his leg is taken away.

This play is most certainly not black-and-white. There are still some things left unknown by the end of the play and while it gives the appearance of ending almost exactly where it starts, there is no true closure except for the existence of the buried child.

Glass of Water

If I had to pick just one person for the protagonist for Glass of Water, (or, at least, I can't think of a reason why it is not useful for the script) I would have to choose Abigail Churchill. With Abigail, we hear of her struggles before we even see her, with Arthur Masham explaining to the Viscount Bolingbroke (Henry St. John) that he was in love with a woman who just lost her job and that he cannot marry her though they are in love due to the person that is sponsoring him. Abigail's struggles continue when we find out that the job posting she came to the palace to apply for has already been filled. But a hopeful situation occurred when a then unknown lady came in whom  Abigail had been kind to before offers her a job. That lady turns out to be Queen Anne, but the news becomes bad quickly for her. The Duchess of Marlborough has the ear of the Queen and also happens to be Abigail's cousin and does not like the scandal of having someone as poor as Abigail relative to her. While Abigail's occupation goes back and forth, she finds out her love, Masham, has killed a man and must go on the run, but before he can leave, he is given a higher station that forces him to stay, all thanks to his secret "sponsor." That sponsor turns out to be the Duchess, and she is in love with Masham. But that is not the only one, the Queen is also in love with him and Abigail tries to stop both of them getting her man. She also has to deal with her friend, the Viscount, getting threaten by (who else) the Duchess. Abigail deals with a lot of struggle in such a short amount of time and it makes it easy to want to root for her. In the end, though, her struggles prove worthwhile when she gets the approval of the Queen to marry her love and that her love does not go to jail for killing a man. Of all the characters in the play, it almost appears she has the most "screen time" and while the some of the characters also suffer from some difficulties, hers seems to be the more pronounced.