M. Butterfly
| M. Butterfly | |
|---|---|
| Written by | David Henry Hwang |
| Characters | Rene Gallimard Song Liling Marc Helga M. Toulon Comrade Chin Renee and others |
| Date premiered | February 10, 1988 |
| Place premiered | National Theatre, Washington, D.C. |
| Original language | English |
| Subject | East/West cultural stereotypes |
| Genre | Drama |
| Setting | A Paris prison, 1988; recollections of Beijing and Paris |
M. Butterfly is a play by David Henry Hwang loosely based on the relationship between French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu, a male Peking opera singer. The play premiered on Broadway in 1988 and won the 1988 Tony Award for Best Play.
M. Butterfly premiered at the National Theatre, Washington, D.C., on February 10, 1988.
The play opened on Broadway at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre on March 20, 1988, closing after 777 performances on January 27, 1990. It was produced by Stuart Ostrow and directed by John Dexter and starred John Lithgow as Gallimard and BD Wong as Song Liling. David Dukes, Anthony Hopkins, Tony Randall, and John Rubinstein played Gallimard at various times during the original run. A highly unusual staging featuring Puccini's music and the Kazakh countertenor Erik Kurmangaliev in the title role was undertaken by Roman Viktyuk in Russia in 1990.
The play was a 1989 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
It is currently published by Plume and in an acting edition by Dramatists Play Service. An audio recording of the play was produced by L. A. Theatre Works, with Lithgow and Wong reprising their Broadway roles along with Margaret Cho.
The play was inspired by Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly. The first act introduces the main character, Rene Gallimard, who is a civil servant attached to the French embassy in China. He falls in love with a beautiful Chinese opera diva, Song Liling, who is actually a man masquerading as a woman. In traditional Beijing opera, females were banned from the stage; all female roles (dan) were played by males. The first act ends with Gallimard returning to France in shame and living alone after his wife, Helga, finds out about his affair with Song and leaves him.
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