Criticism Exercise: M. Butterfly

M. Butterfly. by David Henry Hwang


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Song Liling: Under the robes, beneath everything, it was always me. Tell me you adore me.

Rene Gallimard: How could you, who understood me so well, make such a mistake? You've shown me your true self, and what I love was the lie, perfect lie, that's been destroyed.
Song Liling: You never really loved me.
Rene Gallimard: I'm a man who loved a woman created by a man. Anything else simply falls short.

A. and I made it to the Guthrie's 2010 production of M. Butterfly just one day before it closed, and I'm so glad we did. I always had the feeling that I didn't need to see the play since I'd already seen (and liked) the 1993 film version with Willem Defoe.

But as Robert McKee rightly argues, it's a valuable experience to compare plays that have been adapted into films. Compared to the film, Hwang's play goes much further to make expansive and even pedantic statements about the Orientalism so effectively encapsulated in the story of Madame Butterfly, the tragic story of beautiful Oriental who falls for a Western man:

Rene Gallimard: You made me see the beauty of the story, of her death. It's, it's pure sacrifice. He's not worthy of it, but what can she do? She loves him so much. It's very beautiful.
Song Liling: Well, yes, to a Westerner.
Rene Gallimard: I beg your pardon?
Song Liling: It's one of your favorite fantasies, isn't it? The submissive Oriental woman and the cruel white man.

In an example of the expansiveness I mentioned, our protagonist here, the Frenchman Gallimard, has an "extra-extra-marital affair," with a Swedish chick he meets at a party. After they have sex, she gets a big scene in which she theorizes that male aggression is all a matter of not being able to settle who has the biggest penis. Her monologue is truly funny, though at the same time vaguely reminiscent of conversations from undergraduate classes on war and colonialism. Most importantly, it's largely a step outside the central plot of the story, so of course in any movie adaptation it would most likely have to be cut.

The play production is also more expansive in terms of Hwang's technique of very fast scene changes, characters delivering dialogue in multiple scenes at the same time, and exposition in the play simultaneous to performances of the play-within-the-play, the opera Madame Butterfly. In the Guthrie production, scenes from the opera are briefly re-enacted on a small stage above the main floor of the Wurtele thrust. The effect of the much more powerful sounds of the opera scenes, with the players in the drama looking at the opera as we look at them looking at the opera, is a really classic meta-moment in a dramatic story, all geared towards revealing the way we each of us take up romantic fantasies through the art we love (Madame Butterfly may not be politically correct, but to think kids these days are subbing in television and video games can remind us that opera is not so bad...). The effect of "oh-my-gosh, we all do that sort of thing" is more palpable in the play version, at least when it is directed properly. The great amount of space commanded by the Wurtele Thrust is no doubt a big help as well.

As Hwang tells us, this story is much more than a condemnation of Orientalism. Song Liling is a tragic figure as well, a cynical manipulator of Orientalism who comes up with his own fantasy of inverting the Butterfly role and taking up the role of Pinkerton, the selfish and unfaithful Western lover, with his Armani suit and implication of big penis. But Gallimard manages to get back at Liling one last time by denying Liling this final advantage. Gallimard sticks truer to operatic tragic figure than Liling expected: he only loves an ideal, and realizing the impossibility of the ideal, is committed to destruction.

So goes what just has to be the flagship example of postcolonial tragic drama. (Geez, what play beat this one in the 1988 Pulitzer awards?)

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Unexpected Theatre

Keith Hennessy in Crotch

Thanks to JPF for introducing us to this one man show. Keith Hennessy gives his audience chocolate, speaks to them, and reads them a poem before they even move into the auditorium. And once we are in there, we are not to sit down immediately but move up onto the stage to examine some posters, books, a number of lemons with night-lights jammed into them, a chair with a big pile of shea butter on it. Meanwhile, Keith dresses up as if to enact an S&M scenario and begins whipping a big stuffed animal hanging by a rope, with a black hood.

At its worst, this seems like pure shock tactics, perhaps a crude effort at awaking political consciousness (I seem to remember one poster asking us to think of all the people in pain, but I forget the details). But then we sit down again and Henessy begins to do a more familiar one-man show. He lectures a bit about the artistic and philosophical traditions that contextualize Joseph Beuys: Plato, Hegel, Butler. One thousand plus years of art history. From the worship, and thus, portrayal, of gods, to that of men, to that of the self in general: Gott, Ich. Shamans play a role here. So do many Germans and German terms.

This lecture/mindmap scene is one of the show's strongest. Later it turns just a bit crazy as Keith tries a modern shamanic spirit journey/call, and crazier still when he gets naked and breaks out a needle and thread.

Still, a fun way to spend a Friday evening, especially if a friend can score you five-buck tickets. Minneapolis proves itself a solid place to find some avant-garde goodness.

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Finished the Red Brush; back from the Wilderness

Idema, W. with Beata Grant. The Red Brush : Writing Women of Imperial China. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center ; distributed by Harvard University Press, 2004.

At long last, I finished this massive anthology of women's writings in so many genres and from so many different periods of time. I feel like I've just been introduced to a whole small town where everybody is related to everybody else and every relative worships each of her or his elders. Either that or they categorically condemn them.

My favorite section by far is on the drama, near the end of the book. We meet Xie Xucai, the Chinese Yentl, who for me brings to life the adventure of journeying past what culture makes you out to be. (The picture below is from a 2006 production put on by Eslite Bookstore in Taiwan.)



Every woman who learned to read and write in Chinese was once already in drag, because these were the things that men did, as much as wearing pants.

Today the spring colors are splendid and I am consumed with longing. And so to amuse myself, I sit here alone, dressed up as a man... -- Xie Xucai, in The Fake Image《喬影》

So then for Xie Xucai to actually wear pants is only a dramatic flourish that emphasizes the transgression, and hence the adventure, of reading and writing. If you think about this long enough, the figure of the Chinese woman writer becomes the figure of any writer or any artist, because art is really at essence the pouring out of the mind into envisioning some new thing that will then inevitably come to stand for its maker.

Writing is always a kind of self-creation. That a artist can produce something completely unlike his own life, making the association between the work and the identity of its creator an arbitrary and uninformative point, is simply an entry point for the larger realization that the self and its products are equally ephemeral, unknowable, "dream-like." This larger truth reduces gender to a trivia, but that's admittedly poor consolation.
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