M. Butterfly

Written by David Henry Hwang; directed by Julie Taymor

Opened on October 26, 20017

In the nearly three decades since David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly premiered on Broadway—winning Tonys for Best Play, Best Director (John Dexter) and Best Featured Actor (B.D. Wong)—unearthed facts have buttressed Hwang’s hard-to-believe true story about a Frenchman who had an affair with a Chinese spy for several years, apparently without knowing his beloved was a man.

Having incorporated some of this material makes play a different animal: while as fascinating as ever, the added elements let us see this story through our present lens; what in 1988 would have seemed implausible to audiences—gender fluidity—is now firmly in our wheelhouse, making M. Butterfly more in the present by dramatizing how sexual and social taboos are broken down.

Sitting in prison, French diplomat Rene Gallimard tells his tale about his love affair with Song Liling—a Peking Opera performer—a relationship that tentatively grows more intimate and physical, which we discover during an unnecessarily descriptive courtroom scene in which Song describes how he transformed himself to make Rene believe he had the requisite female parts to engage in sexual intercourse.

In Hwang’s new version, Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly is less central; instead, a Chinese opera The Butterfly Lovers is given two lengthy excerpts, which director Julie Taymor—with help from her arranger-composer-partner Elliot Goldenthal—stages with a flourish, the lone moments of visual ravishment in an otherwise restrained production. Large, colorful screens slide on and off the stage almost continuously in a play with dozens of short scenes in varied locales; Taymor’s consummate design team—scenic (Paul Steinberg), lighting (Donald Holder), costume (Constance Hoffman) and sound (Will Pickens)—creates a vivid world of deception and, even more damagingly for Rene, self-deception.

Clive Owen gives an intense and ironical performance as Rene, balancing the ludicrousness of his fate with an almost reaction to each new, puzzling situation. Although he’s less exasperated than the role’s originator John Lithgow was, Owen effortlessly finds the humanity needed to ground this character in a reality that points the way to his abyss.

As Song, Jin Ha is persuasively gender fluid, although our first glimpse of him as a man plays havoc with subsequent scenes in which he’s Song as a woman. Despite some contrivances and overexplicit explanations, M. Butterfly flourishes in its new metamorphosis.

M. Butterfly

Cort Theatre, 138 West 48th Street, New York, NY