M. Butterfly, by David Henry Hwang, is Arena Stage’s masterful opener for its 2004-2005 season. Director Tazewell Thompson, whose credits range from La Scala to New York City Opera to numerous Arena Stage productions, has created an impeccable revival with outstanding acting, staging, and costumes. This widely acclaimed play, which premiered in 1988, still seems shocking because of the way it insidiously connects the American audience to current day issues related to war and gender as well as poking uncomfortable fun at things we love.
    Told in a post-modern narrative by the main character, Rene Gallimard, a French diplomat who was posted to Beijing from 1960 to 1970, the play opens as the protagonist paces in a prison cell. Gallimard (Stephen Bogardus) has been convicted of treason and tries desperately to account for himself, to himself. What has brought about his complete ruination, humiliation, and imprisonment is an affair with a Chinese actor whom Gallimard comes to call "Butterfly." His fantasy is that Butterfly, as in Puccini’s tragic Madama Butterfly, represents the perfect woman. Unfortunately, Song Liling, Gallimard’s Butterfly, is a Mata Hari working for the Red Chinese government that hopes to topple the Americans waging a war of liberation in Vietnam.
    Based on the real life story of the low-level French diplomat Bernard Bouriscot, this is a hard-to-believe tale of a man who has a 19-year affair with a person he believes to be a woman. Sixteen years since this play premiered, the gender of Butterfly no longer seems surprising and, after all, doesn’t M. Butterfly translate as Monsieur Butterfly? Yet what J. Hiroyuki Liao, as the submissive Chinese opera singer, achieves in the role still adds up to breath-stopping shock. Like the real life Mata Hari, Liao is tall. His face, even under the white geisha makeup, looks too angular to be the beautiful woman that Gallimard keeps describing and Liao’s movements, though graceful, seem more aggressively mannish than womanly. However, Liao’s figure and legs are convincingly feminine by Asian standards.
    At the end of the play when Song Liling, who has already appeared as a man in a French court to testify against Gallimard, disrobes completely, it is hard to decide why one feels so shocked. Most theatergoers by now are not fazed by full frontal nudity. The dilemma resides in the extreme discomfort that Bogardus as Gallimard projects. Like Don Quixote, Gallimard has been forced to look into the mirror of reality. Unlike Don Quixote, Gallimard has learned the difference between fantasy and reality but consciously chooses fantasy and death in the manner of Madama Butterfly. Gallimard tells Song, “You showed me your true self when all I loved was a lie.” Thus, Hwang flip-flops who the tragic character is, such that Gallimard, who thinks of himself as the macho Pinkerton, husband of the bereft Madama Butterfly, is the one abandoned and disgraced.
    What makes this entertainingly funny and painful play stand up to the test of time is the thought-provoking dialogue. Although Gallimard says at the opening that he was the boy voted least likely to be invited to a party, this married diplomat—after he took Butterfly as his mistress—has a fling with a bored Swedish girl attached to the diplomatic community. Her name is also Renee (played engagingly by Kelly Brady) and she says, after a comic inventory of the names for the male sex organ—cock is like a chicken, prick sounds painful, dick seems like someone not in the room—that people fight wars because they wear clothes. The Rorschach on this statement—make love not war—makes Gallimard uncomfortable and he runs back to Butterfly whom he has not visited in weeks and asks to see her naked. She answers, “I thought you respected my shame.”
    Song delivers an incisive speech in the courtroom in which he attempts to explain why Gallimard was so resoundingly deceived that he was a woman. Song says there are two reasons. The first is that men always believe what they want to hear. The second reason is more complicated and involves many mistaken assumptions by Westerners about the “Orient.” Song’s list runs the gamut from the East being seen as inscrutable, feminine, submissive, and agreeable. Thrown in with this mistaken view of Asians is the Western male’s “rape mentality.” Song concludes that this is why Westerners will “lose in all dealings with the Orient.”
    The playwright completes his knockout punch by putting American fans of Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly on notice. Song as Butterfly lets Gallimard know of her disdain for Puccini and his little women. A short re-enactment of the opera occurs at the scene where Madame Butterfly and Suzuki, Butterfly’s maid, fill the house with flowers as Butterfly anticipates Pinkerton’s return. Here Arena Stage lets loose a rain of shimmering blossoms that excite sentimental nerve endings. What tempers the enchantment is that Suzuki is also Comrade Chin, the very unwomanly contact to the Red Chinese Army under whose command Song operates. Hwang’s Suzuki (played by Ako, a powerhouse with former ties to Japan’s famous Takarazuka Theatre Company) barks to Madame Butterfly, “Girl, he’s a loser. This is finished! Kaput!” Yet Americans, who fail to understand that Butterfly does not represent realistic Japanese behavior, are suckers for the emotional aria “Un bel di” that details Butterfly’s agonizing wait for Pinkerton’s ship to return and for him to walk up the hill to her open arms. Arena capitalizes on this after Gallimard dresses up as Butterfly, whites his face, reddens his lips, and seems to commit suicide while the aria plays and a second rain of petals falls.

    Washington, September 9, 2004                                                                  - Karren L. Alenier