David Henry Hwang's modern classic, M. BUTTERFLY charts the scandalous romance between a married French diplomat and a mysterious Chinese opera singer - a remarkable love story of international espionage and personal betrayal. Their 20-year relationship pushed and blurred the boundaries between male and female, east and west - while redefining the nature of love and the devastating cost of deceit.
Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe Award winner Clive Owen will star as Rene Gallimard in the first Broadway revival of David Henry Hwang's Tony Award-winning play, M. BUTTERFLY, directed by Tony Award winner Julie Taymor.
For the Tony Award-winning play's first Broadway return, Hwang will introduce new material inspired by the real-life love affair between French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and Chinese opera singer Shi Pei Pu that has come to light since the play's 1988 premiere.
'M. Butterfly,' which officially returned to Broadway on Thursday night with a marquee director in Julie Taymor, a big star in Clive Owen and a significantly revised script from Hwang, is now an entirely different and very complicated proposition. The power balance between West and East has been transformed: Hwang himself acknowledged this in his underappreciated 2011 comedy 'Chinglish,' a play that displays much ambivalence about the so-called new China and is very much in dialogue with 'M. Butterfly.' 'Chinglish' is all about another feckless Western man in a sexually compromising situation, this time in a wholly subservient role. China doesn't flutter. It roars with capital.
Hwang and director Julie Taymor have taken a curious route to address that challenge, going back to include facts that subsequently came to light about the characters' real-life inspirations, and removing much of the illusion in a work that revolves around erotic deception. While broadening the play beyond the perspective of the fictionalized Frenchman, Rene Gallimard, to include that of his lover of 20 years, Beijing Opera performer Song Liling, the production wades into didactic territory that fights against the work's inherent theatricality.
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