M. Butterfly

About the show

The first act introduces the main character, René Gallimard, a civil servant attached to the French embassy in China. In a prison, Gallimard is serving a sentence for treason. Through a series of flashbacks and imagined conversations, Gallimard tells an audience his story about a woman that he loved and lost. He falls in love with a beautiful Chinese opera singer, Song Liling. Gallimard is unaware that all female roles in traditional Beijing opera were actually played by men, as women were banned from the stage. The first act ends with Gallimard returning to France in shame and living alone after he asks his wife, Helga, for a divorce, admitting to her that he's had a mistress. It is revealed in act 2 that Song had been acting as a spy for the Chinese government, and she is actually a man who has disguised himself as a woman to seduce Gallimard and extract information from him. They stay together for 20 years until the truth is revealed, and Gallimard is convicted of treason and imprisoned. Unable to face the fact that his "perfect woman" is a man, he retreats deep within himself and his memories. The action of the play is depicted as his disordered, distorted recollection of the events surrounding their affair. In act three, Song reveals himself to the audience as a man, without makeup and dressed in men's clothing. Gallimard claims he only loved the idea of Butterfly, never Song himself. Gallimard throws Song and his clothing off the stage, but holds onto Butterfly's kimono. In scene three, the setting returns to Gallimard's prison cell, as he puts on makeup and Butterfly's wig and kimono. Then he stabs himself, committing suicide just as Butterfly does in the opera. For the Julie Taymor–directed revival in 2017, Hwang revisited the text to incorporate further information that had emerged about the Boursicot case, and address intersectional identities. Taymor and Hwang wanted their new approach to consider “present public discussion and awareness of nonbinary genders, the growth of China as a superpower, and details about the true story... which were not available to Hwang when he wrote the first version.” Changes include: Song Liling initially presents as male to Gallimard, only to claim to be physically female but made to dress up as a man by her parents. Hwang noted in an interview that the surprise reveal that Song Liling is actually a man no longer carried the shock value it did in 1988, especially after The Crying Game used the same tactic only a few years later. Another said it “was neither a critical nor a popular success…[but] an important, timely, and productive reconsideration of the play and its story in light of new acceptances of gender fluidity and the changing balance of power between Asia and the West.” Regarding the long-debated questions of Song and Gallimard's intimate relations, another reviewer said “Song’s defiant explanation to an over-curious French judge struck me as Hwang wanting to put an end to the prying once and for all.”