Before I can begin writing, I must “break the back of the story,” and find some angle which compels me to set pen to paper. I was driving down Santa Monica Boulevard one afternoon, and asked myself, “What did Bouriscot think he was getting in this Chinese actress?” The answer came to me clearly: “He probably thought he had found Madame Butterfly.”
The idea of doing a deconstructivist Madame Butterfly immediately appealed to me. This, despite the fact that I didn’t even know the plot of the opera! I knew Butterfly only as a cultural stereotype; speaking of an Asian woman, we would sometimes say, “She’s pulling a Butterfly,” which meant playing the submissive Oriental number. Yet, I felt convinced that the libretto would include yet another lotus blossom pining away for a cruel Caucasian man, and dying for her love. Such a story has become too much of a cliché not to be included in the archtypal East-West romance that started it all. Sure enough, when I purchased the record, I discovered it contained a wealth of sexist and racist cliches, reaffirming my faith in Western culture.
Very soon after, I came up with the basic “arc” of my play: the Frenchman fantasizes that he is Pinkerton and his lover is Butterfly. By the end of the piece, he realizes that it is he who has been Butterfly, in that the Frenchman has been duped by love; the Chinese spy, who exploited that love, is therefore the real Pinkerton. I wrote a proposal to Stuart Ostrow, who found it very exciting. (On the night of the Tony Awards, Stuart produced my original two-page treatment, and we were gratified to see that it was, indeed, the play I eventually wrote.)
I wrote a play, rather than a musical, because, having “broken the back” of the story, I wanted to start immediately and not be hampered by the lengthy process of collaboration. I would like to think, however, that the play has retained many of its musical roots. So Monsieur Butterfly was completed in six weeks between September and mid-October, 1986. My wife, Ophelia, thought Monsieur Butterfly too obvious a title, and suggested I abbreviate it in the French fashion. Hence, M. Butterfly, far more mysterious and ambiguous, was the result.
I sent the play to Stuart Ostrow as a courtesy, assuming he would not be interested in producing what had become a straight play. Instead, he flew out to Los Angeles immediately for script conferences. Coming from a background in the not-for-profit theater, I suggested that we develop the work at a regional institution. Stuart, nothing if not bold, argued for bringing it directly to Broadway.
It was also Stuart who suggested John Dexter to direct. I had known Dexter’s work only by its formidable reputation. Stuart sent the script to John, who called back the next day, saying it was the best play he’d read in twenty years. Naturally, this predisposed me to like him a great deal. We met in December in New York. Not long after, we persuaded Eiko Ishioka to design our sets and costumes. I had admired her work from afar ever since, as a college student I had seen her poster for Apocalypse Now in Japan. By January, 1987, Stuart had optioned M. Butterfly, Dexter was signed to direct, and the normally sloth-like pace of commercial theater had been given a considerable prod.
On January 4, 1988, we commenced rehearsals. I was very pleased that John Lithgow had agreed to play the French diplomat, whom I named Rene Gallimard. Throughout his tenure with us, Lithgow was every inch the center of our company, intelligent and professional, passionate and generous. B. D. Wong was forced to endure a five-month audition period before we selected him to play Song Liling. Watching B. D.’s growth was one of the joys of the rehearsal process, as he constantly attained higher levels of performance. It became clear that we had been fortunate enough to put together a company with not only great talent, but also wonderful camaraderie.
As for Dexter, I have never worked with a director more respectful of text and bold in the uses of theatricality. On the first day of rehearsal, the actors were given movement and speech drills. Then Dexter asked that everyone not required at rehearsal leave the room. A week later, we returned for an amazingly thorough run-through. It was not until that day that I first heard my play read, a note I direct at many regional theaters who “develop” a script to death.
We opened in Washington, D.C., at the National Theatre, where West Side Story and Amadeus had premiered. On the morning after opening night, most of the reviews were glowing, except for The Washington Post. Throughout our run in Washington, Stuart never pressured us to make the play more “commercial” in reaction to that review. We all simply concluded that the gentleman was possibly insecure about his own sexual orientation and therefore found the play threatening. And we continued our work.
Once we opened in New York, the play found a life of its own. I suppose the most gratifying thing for me is that we had never compromised to be more “Broadway”; we simply did the work we thought best. That our endeavor should be rewarded to the degree it has is one of those all-too-rare instances when one’s own perception and that of the world are in agreement.
Many people have subsequently asked me about the “ideas” behind the play. From our first preview in Washington, I have been pleased that people leaving the theater were talking not only about the sexual, but also the political, issues raised by the work.
From my point of view, the “impossible” story of a Frenchman duped by a Chinese man masquerading as a woman always seemed perfectly explicable; given the degree of misunderstanding between men and women and also between East and West, it seemed inevitable that a mistake of this magnitude would one day take place.
Gay friends have told me of a derogatory term used in their community: “Rice Queen”—a gay Caucasian man primarily attracted to Asians. In these relationships, the Asian virtually always plays the role of the “woman”; the Rice Queen, culturally and sexually, is the “man.” This pattern of relationships had become so codified that, until recently, it was considered unnatural for gay Asians to date one another. Such men would be taunted with a phrase which implied they were lesbians.
Similarly, heterosexual Asians have long been aware of “Yellow Fever”—Caucasian men with a fetish for exotic Oriental women. I have often heard it said that “Oriental women make the best wives.” (Rarely is this heard from the mouths of Asian men, incidentally.) This mythology is exploited by the Oriental mail-order bride trade which has flourished over the past decade. American men can now send away for catalogues of “obedient, domesticated” Asian women looking for husbands. Anyone who believes such stereotypes are a thing of the past need look no further than Manhattan cable television, which advertises call girls from “the exotic east, where men are king; obedient girls, trained in the art of pleasure.”
In these appeals, we see issues of racism and sexism intersect. The catalogues and TV spots appeal to a strain in men which desires to reject Western women for what they have become—independent, assertive, self-possessed—in favor of a more reactionary model—the pre-feminist, domesticated geisha girl.
That the Oriental woman is penultimately feminine does not of course imply that she is always “good.” For every Madonna there is a whore; for every lotus blossom there is also a dragon lady. In popular culture, “good” Asian women are those who serve the White protagonist in his battle against her own people, often sleeping with him in the process. Stallone’s Rambo II, Cimino’s Year of the Dragon, Clavell’s Shogun, Van Lustbader’s The Ninja are all familiar examples.
Now our considerations of race and sex intersect the issue of imperialism. For this formula—good natives serve Whites, bad natives rebel—is consistent with the mentality of colonialism. Because they are submissive and obedient, good natives of both sexes necessarily take on “feminine” characteristics in a colonialist world. Gunga Din’s unfailing devotion to his British master, for instance, is not so far removed from Butterfly’s slavish faith in Pinkerton.
It is reasonable to assume that influences and attitudes so pervasively displayed in popular culture might also influence our policymakers as they consider the world. The neo-Colonialist notion that good elements of a native society, like a good woman, desire submissi
on to the masculine West speaks precisely to the heart of our foreign policy blunders in Asia and elsewhere.
For instance, Frances Fitzgerald wrote in Fire in the Lake, “The idea that the United States could not master the problems of a country as small and underdeveloped as Vietnam did not occur to Johnson as a possibility.” Here, as in so many other cases, by dehumanizing the enemy, we dehumanize ourselves. We become the Rice Queens of realpolitik.
M. Butterfly has sometimes been regarded as an anti-American play, a diatribe against the stereotyping of the East by the West, of women by men. Quite to the contrary, I consider it a plea to all sides to cut through our respective layers of cultural and sexual misperception, to deal with one another truthfully for our mutual good, from the common and equal ground we share as human beings.
For the myths of the East, the myths of the West, the myths of men, and the myths of women—these have so saturated our consciousness that truthful contact between nations and lovers can only be the result of heroic effort. Those who prefer to bypass the work involved will remain in a world of surfaces, misperceptions running rampant. This is, to me, the convenient world in which the French diplomat and the Chinese spy lived. This is why, after twenty years, he had learned nothing at all about his lover, not even the truth of his sex.
D.H.H
New York City
September, 1988
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