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Madame Butterfly's Revenge: Racism, Sexism, and Imperialism Come to Broadway
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14361 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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6 / 1988 |
1,771 Words |
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Richard Grenier
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It has been a long time since a new American play has received such reviews on Broadway.
"Visionary. Brilliant" (New York Times). "Electrifying" (Wall Street Journal). "Theater at its most challenging and entertaining. Will never be forgotten" (New York Post). "Thrilling" (CBS). "One I will see and see again. Unforgettable" (NBC). "Breathtaking" (Metromedia). "Masterful" (USA Today). "Dazzling" (Christian Science Monitor). And so on, and on: AP UPI ("a theatrical treasure"), the Hearst newspapers, Newhouse newspapers, even the normally prudent trade publication, Variety.
The reviews convey no notion that there is anything polemical about M. Butterfly, even though author David Hwang--in a major interview published in the New York Times Magazine before opening night--let it slip that the historical episode that inspired the play revealed to him all that was false in "racism, sexism, and imperialism." We must therefore prepare ourselves for a major political event. Racism, sexism, and imperialism, all three, are to be eviscerated in one play. One might well wonder what kind of marvelous episode could inspire such a sweeping enterprise. USA Today gives us a hint: "Just when you've seen every possible romantic coupling. M. Butterfly presents one of the most provocative and touching of all." So the inspiration seems to have been some sort of romance. What was this romantic coupling? Why, the twenty-year love affair, begun in Beijing, of a French diplomat with a bewitching, beguiling, entrancing Chinese woman who, during the diplomat's trial in Paris for treason, turned out to be a man.
High Treason
What could be more touching and romantic than that? Bernard Boursicot, the diplomat, claimed during his trial that you could have knocked him over with a feather. He'd been sleeping with this lovely Chinese creature for twenty years and had never noticed she was a man. Boursicot was absolutely thunderstruck (he claimed), appalled (he claimed), a trifle unobservant. And then there were those secret French documents he'd been passing along to her (him). This was hard to explain away, whether his loved one was male or female. Which was why Mr. Boursicot was convicted of high treason by a French security court and sent to prison, where he remains to this day.
As I watched M. (Monsieur) Butterfly, I realized with a mixture of amusement and horror that I had witnessed this whole denouement at first hand--or at least, from an orchestra seat--as I was in Paris at the time this most bizarre of sex-and-security scandals broke. From the French point of view, needless to say, the trial was the occasion for both the grinding of teeth and ribald laughter. I shall explain. After many years of marriage, when a woman suddenly sues for divorce because she's just discovered her husband is another female and not a man as she'd thought, the universal assumption in homosexual circles, France, and indeed most of the world is that--romance having sadly departed--we are witnessing the spiteful breakup of a homosexual love affair. Similarly, with a man who suddenly discovers that his clinging, adorable wife is--gadzooks!--another male. Any other interpretation defies credibility.
Another worldly fact widely recognized in Europe is that compromising a diplomat sexually, or homosexually, with the accompanying threat of blackmail is a favorite technique
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