It’s been thirty years, and I’ve had other opportunities to revive the play that I’ve passed on. In retrospect, I was not in a hurry to revive M. Butterfly because of the revival, or did you set out to revise it and then the opportunity for production came along? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?ĭavid Henry Hwang: This rewrite came about as a result of having a production. The following interview contains spoilers for both the 1988 version of M. I sat down with David to discuss his revision process. Shock and awe at the revelation of Song’s biological sex were exchanged for a more contemporary exploration of gender fluidity. Butterfly new life, David chose to rework the script for the Broadway production currently playing at the Cort Theatre. Moreover, the infamous climax of the play no longer felt surprising as other narratives of gender confusion played out on stage and screen.
But in the thirty years since the original production, a wealth of new information has been discovered about the lives of Bernard Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu, the real-life French diplomat and Chinese spy whose affair inspired M. Butterfly broke ground when it premiered in 1988, bringing gender nonconformity to the stage in new and surprising ways. David Henry Hwang’s Tony Award-winning play M.
0 kommentar(er)
