M Butterfly

[MadPhan]

Posted: 5/5/08 at 8:30am

Has anyone here seen or read this play? I just read it for my English class and I LOVED it, especially the last part! It was intense! I guess I'm wondering if anyone else knows it and what they thought of it.

[KirbyCat]

Posted: 5/5/08 at 9:48am

Wasn't it like just on PBS or something? It was filmed live too I think.

[Roscoe]

Posted: 5/5/08 at 9:52am

I saw the original production, and didn't like it at all. Neither did any of the people I went with. We all just looked at each other at the intermission, and our host looked back and said, "If you want to leave, feel free, but I have to stay."

I stayed. Ouch.

I understand that the closing notice had already been posted backstage on opening night, but the show got a bunch of surprise good reviews. Surprise indeed.

[once a month]

Posted: 5/5/08 at 10:08am

I loved the original production. I thought it was a beautiful, startling, provocative show, but then I like that type of entertainment. I felt the same way about Equus, The Goat or Who Is Sylvia and Indiscretians. I also read each of the scripts, and relived each production. To me, and as much as I favor musicals, this type of daring theatre is the reason I keep coming back, before the reviews are out I must add. I truly want my honest opinion and feelings to emerge during a show without the 'outside help'. I won't even check these boards about a specific show until after my experiencing it firsthand.

[doodlenyc]

Posted: 5/5/08 at 10:09am

Fantastic play and I believe Lithgow deserved the tony that year.

[SporkGoddess]

Posted: 5/5/08 at 12:35pm

I absolutely loved it. However, I feel that it doesn't consider every aspect of Madama Butterfly and is rather harsh on it.

[WickedBoy2]

Posted: 5/5/08 at 1:00pm

Boring.

[DMsquared2]

Posted: 5/5/08 at 1:03pm

There is a 2 disc, audio CD of M. Butterfly read/performed by John Lithgow and B.D. Wong.

The voice cast also includes: Margaret Cho, David Dukes, Joanna Frank, Arye Gross and Kathryn Layng.


http://www.amazon.com/M-Butterfly-David-Henry-Hwang/dp/1580811779/ref=ed_oe_a

[WickedBoy2]

Posted: 5/5/08 at 1:11pm

I saw the original production in the UK before it moved to the West End of London and eventually, Broadway. It stared Anthony Hopkin's just before he hit the big time in the world of movies. He recalls it being the least pleasant of his theatrical achievements and expressed no interest in doing the movie.

[BigFatBlonde]

Posted: 5/5/08 at 1:28pm

I saw the original B'way production with B.D. Wong... but late in the run with Tony Randall.

By this time.. I think some of the magic had worn off and most people were coming to see a TV star and Wong naked on stage.

The LATW radio production is pretty good.

[Not Barker, Todd.]

Posted: 5/5/08 at 3:37pm

I read the play, but I wasn't sure what the point was. I may have to listen to the audio version.

[South Fl Marc]

Posted: 5/5/08 at 3:45pm

"By this time.. I think some of the magic had worn off and most people were coming to see a TV star and Wong naked on stage."

Actually by the time Tony Randall went into the role, Alex Mappa had replaced B.D Wong.
Updated On: 5/6/08 at 03:45 PM

[Roscoe]

Posted: 5/5/08 at 3:46pm

The point of the play seemed to be that white Westerners will never understand any ethnic group but their own, and will be destroyed by the fantasies they create.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

[devonian.t]

Posted: 5/5/08 at 3:52pm

I saw the London production too.

I loved the direction by John Dexter- the set involved a steep, arcing slope from usc to dsr. When the Hopkins character finally accepted the truth of his situation, he fell/ slid down the slope in a very dramatic fashion. Best bit of the show. The audience loved it and I think it had at least a 9 month run. Now who the heck took over from AH?

Wickedboy, you must remember. For some nutty reason, I am remembering someone like Nigel Havers, or equally unexpected... no, got it! It was Peter Egan!

Here is an extract from a review I just found from London:

The advertising logo is unchanged, and Eiko Ishioka's set has retained its sweeping blood-red sheen, but something seems to have happened to David Henry Hwang's 'M. Butterfly' in its trip across the Atlantic. The latest of a dozen or so recent American shows to open in London this season, the local production of Mr. Hwang's Tony-winning drama illustrates the risks of such crossings. While visitors to London often bypass homegrown fare in search of plays unavailable in New York, comparison theatergoing has its rewards. Sometimes, as in 'M. Butterfly,' one gets only an outline of the New York impact; elsewhere, as in 'Steel Magnolias' and 'Speed-the-Plow,' fresh faces lend unexpected resonance, even though all three plays opened here to largely mixed reviews.

Still elsewhere, as in the now-departed 'I'm Not Rappaport' and 'A Walk in the Woods,' American plays benefit from the kind of prestige casting unusual in New York. Paul Scofield and Alec Guinness, those plays' respective leading men, are infrequent inhabitants of any stage, and their star presences made something almost noble out of what some took to be Broadway at its most middlebrow.

Anthony Hopkins, too, is capable of nobility, of a pugnacious, bellicose grandeur rarely encountered on the New York stage. The actor last appeared on Broadway in 1974 in John Dexter's production of 'Equus,' and it's not hard to see why the same director thought of Mr. Hopkins to head the London cast of 'M. Butterfly.' Like Peter Shaffer, Mr. Hwang has written an anguished psychodrama told in flashback with frequent direct address to the audience. His protagonist, the sexually duped French diplomat Rene Gallimard, shares the sardonic, sour wit of Dr. Dysart in the earlier play.

Both plays culminate in a ferocious encounter between two men: Gallimard's discovery that his longstanding feminine ideal, the Chinese opera singer Song Liling, is in fact a male spy; Dysart's embrace of his quivering patient Alan Strang, who has felt a degree of passion, however aberrant, which the doctor himself will never know.

The absence of passion characterizes Mr. Hopkins's work in 'M. Butterfly': his performance rests on its rhetoric while at the same time backing away from the role. Initially, sneering at himself as 'the patron saint of the socially inept,' he sets the tone for an angrier, more bruising Gallimard than either John Lithgow or David Dukes offered in New York, and Mr. Hopkins's burred Welshman's delivery insures that the lines ricochet off the back walls of the Shaftesbury Theater.

But the declamation fails to deepen, and we look in vain for clues to Gallimard. Is he the overgrown naif laid low by a duplicity he barely understands? Or - as Mr. Dukes played him - is he a tense and edgy neurotic stunned into self-immolation by the release of a lifetime's repressions? In its ambiguity and range, the part would seem to be an actor's dream, but Mr. Hopkins falls into the trap many Americans perceive as the British actor's bane: he descants the part without inhabiting it; he offers form divorced from content.


Updated On: 5/6/08 at 03:52 PM

[DMsquared2]

Posted: 5/5/08 at 4:06pm

Actually by the time Tony Randall went into the role, Alex Mappa had replaced B.D Wong.

Don't be hatin' Alec Mapa!


Updated On: 5/5/08 at 04:06 PM

[canmark]

Posted: 5/5/08 at 7:44pm

I saw the touring production with Philip Anglim (sp?) and, I think, Alec Mapa. I thought it was a very good play, and it's a good play to read, too.

The movie, however, was not so good. What was good about the play was it's theatricality--it didn't try to be realistic. The movie realism didn't work, Jone Lone was miscast, and Jeremy Irons, sorry.

I remember Angela Landsbury introducing a scene from the play at the Tonys (remember when they had perfs of plays?), somthing like: "Sometimes happiness is so fleeting our minds will turn summersaults to protect it."

[LizzieCurry]

Posted: 5/5/08 at 10:50pm

I saw my college's production of it a couple of years after I had to read it for English class. I LOVED it (both reading and seeing).

[ScottyDoesn'tKnow]

Posted: 5/5/08 at 11:00pm

I read an essay by Eiko Ishioka discussing how she came up with the set design for M. Butterfly in a textbook she mentioned how one of the reviews raved about her sets how the lighting resembled yin and yang, and she was a bit pissed about that. She was like Asians don't always think about yin and yang.

So, Roscoe, there is some truth to that. It may be a bit tired to you, but not everyone is as cultured as you are.

[SporkGoddess]

Posted: 5/5/08 at 11:13pm

Well, David Henry Hwang admits that he had never seen Madama Butterfly until he had a very biased image of it. Though it does not portray Cio-Cio-san as the strongest woman, many operas tend to have weak female characters--especially Puccini. It isn't just the Asian girl who kills herself for the love of a man.

I wonder if Hwang knew that the original version of Madame Butterfly was about a geisha completely taking advantage of a white man.

[KJisgroovy]

Posted: 5/6/08 at 12:26am

Your right. It's not just about an Asian girl who kills herself for a white men. It's about the superiority of western culture. The feminization of Asian culture. The submissivity of both Asians and women. The benefits of imperialism. Madama Butterfly is an Imperialist work. You should focus on what it does well, its emotion, its beautiful music... rather than trying to make excuses for outdated prejudices.


kmc

[BigFatBlonde]

Posted: 5/6/08 at 12:28am

South Fl Marc,

B.D. Wong returned for a brief stint during the Tony Randall run.

That is when I saw him.

Updated On: 5/6/08 at 12:28 AM

[BigFatBlonde]

Posted: 5/6/08 at 12:33am

From the "unofficial" B.D. Wong website.

"Three other actors shared the tenure of playing Rene Gallimard opposite BD Wong, namely David Dukes (Spence in Slappy and the Stinkers), John Rubenstein (the original Pippin!) and Tony Randall. Tony Randall described his performance as Gallimard as the one role he would like to be remembered for."

http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:GCZvzY9PZicJ:unofficialbdwong.com/theatre.htm+Tony+Randall+B.D.+Wong+M.+Butterfly&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us&client=firefox-a

Updated On: 5/6/08 at 12:33 AM

[once a month]

Posted: 5/6/08 at 8:33am

Thought BD Wong was fabulous. I'm excited since he just joined the theatrical line-up near my home in Princeton. He's doing the one man show Herringbone. It'll be great seeing him once again in the flesh and away from Law and Order.

[lildogs]

Posted: 5/6/08 at 10:12am

I did the play in college and I think it has nothing at all to do with Madama Butterfly or Asian culture or Western white understanding of such. Certainly all those things are mentioned, but they have nothing to do with the human relationships the play concerns.

I always thought it was about falling in love with someone despite your better judgment and creating your own illusion of life to create happines. BOTH Song and Rene enter into a tacit agreement so both their fantasies can thrive in this microcosm they have made. I think the most inportant line is "Only a man knows how a woman should act."

[WickedBoy2]

Posted: 5/6/08 at 10:56am

Hahahaha!
Des Barritt in M. Butterfly!