Sex, Sexuality, and Spying: The Subtle Genius of ‘M. Butterfly’ on Broadway

Spectacle and director Julie Taymor go together; in the case of The Lion King, award-winningly, and in the case of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, with its litany of injuries and controversies, notoriously.

Comparative restraint thrums through her vision for David Henry Hwang’s Tony Award-winning M. Butterfly, first produced as a play in 1988, made into a movie in 1993, and now back on Broadway. This re-invisioning of Madame Butterfly, with boundaries of gender and sexuality blurred, is subtly drawn, and not made for superheroes leaping from balconies.

But it does have an epic sense of melodrama to it. Hwang doesn’t shy from writing it, and Taymor not from directing it. Reviewing the show is tricky, because of the key hinges of plot twists. These are easily Google-able, but they will not be revealed here.

That it is based on the well-known true story of a French diplomat, who—posted in Peking—fell for who he believed to be a female Chinese opera singer.

But Hwang takes important liberties with the complicated tale of desire and identity, set in the 1960s, and all the political upheaval and intrigues of that era.

As an interpretation of Madame Butterfly, it is—thank goodness—the intelligent inverse of the racist and sexist Miss Saigon.

Here, Rene Gallimard (Clive Owen) falls for Song Liling (Jin Ha, in a stunning Broadway debut), but Song is no victim; that is the biggest redraft Hwang succeeds in drawing. Gallimard is. Indeed, he is a victim from the first moment of M. Butterfly, when Song neatly skewers his racist expectations that she will be the meek and submissive Oriental flower. Song will not be that stereotype, far from it.

Owen is the perfect, slightly slapdash and messed-up foreign diplomat, tie askew, hair mussed, ready for a drink, and trapped not in an unhappy marriage but a useful and practical one. He wants something else, someone else; a walk on the wild side, though not as wild as his buddy Marc Pinkerton (Murray Bartlett, letting rip as a drunk and cad, a welcome high-energy puncture to the emotional melodrama).

Song will prove to be a far more formidable partner than Rene expected. Ha is a precise, measured, and transfixing performer, and also a steely observer and critic of the benign-seeming imperialism that Owen embodies. Both are in their own way misfits, both are vulnerable to their country’s masters, but it is Song who plays, most beneficially, the shadowy game of spycraft demanded of her.

The play asks who is using who, who really has power, and—most importantly—what does each partner desire in each other, what do they need from each other; and what element of escape does each signify for the other.

That notion of freedom, as contrasted to confinement, is illustrated by Rene’s incarceration in jail. His jailing, coming as a convoluted result of his relationship with Song and espionage intrigues, is a recurrent thread in the play. Rene is so desperate we don’t find out the truth of what has led him there—the real truth, the truth about Song—that he steps out of the play to plead that the narrative stops.

Paul Steinberg’s design—centered around the walls of the jail cell that collapse and fold outwards to form bigger frames and vistas, as at the opera, or Song’s apartment, or embassy cocktail party—is the stage equivalent of intricate origami. Rene’s world opens up to true love and true desire, and when that is gone it literally closes in on him again.

The play’s major revelations are all Ha’s to effect. This is a fantastic performance by the former NYU Tisch Graduate Acting student, which should at the very least be Tony-nominated, not least because two key moments in the play require both his nudity, and—in a courtroom setting—an explanation of anatomy, both of which Ha transforms from moments of possible victimhood to entirely the opposite.

The end of M. Butterfly had my buddy and I arguing all the way back down Sixth Avenue, as we debated Rene’s sexuality, his knowledge of his sexuality, and the nature of the relationship that Rene and Song eventually had. The beats towards the end of M. Butterfly signify a kind of crass disgust on Rene’s part that invalidate, at least for me, the depth of what the play might suggest about who and what we fall in love with.

The very end of the play returns us to something else: transfiguration, if you like, and a final acceptance and the freedom of the butterfly within him. That’s the ultimate subversion of Hwang’s: the traditional victim of Madame Butterfly is not so here, either. Power and survival rests, as it has from the beginning, with the “other.” The perceived-to-be passive is far from that; the traditional victim most definitely isn’t.

But what stays true for the person who suffers it, as with Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon, is that death is the inevitable price of what seems like an impossible love.

M. Butterfly is at the Cort Theatre, booking through Feb. 25, 2018.