These changes may help explain why the playwright decided to pile on more details of the story, flesh out characters - for example, Liling’s spymaster, Comrade Chin, is given more stage time as is the context of the Chinese Cultural Revolution - and above all, make Song Liling less elusive. But some things have changed since Hwang wrote his hit play: Much new information about the story has emerged, from books and articles and interviews at the same time that general public attitudes are more sophisticated towards such concepts as gender fluidity. Hwang’s explorations of these themes in the play remain timely, shockingly so, given the sudden massive revelations of sexual harassment, and the newly injected macho attitudes of U.S. Hwang, the first Asian-American playwright to have a play on Broadway, used this bizarre true story to explore both masculine attitudes towards women, and Western attitudes toward the East, and help us see the connection between the two. It is inspired by the true story of French diplomat Bernard Boursicot (in the play renamed Rene Gallimard) who passed state secrets to Chinese opera star Shi Pei Pu (Song Liling) whom he took for years to be his female lover, but was in fact a male spy. This seems an especially apt way of thinking about a play that is so much about the interplay between worldview and identity. Did you see the original? How well do you know director Julie Taymor’s best work? Are you crazy about actor Clive Owen? How much you think that risk has paid off in the production running at the Cort Theater depends on who you are as a theatergoer. It was risky for playwright David Henry Hwang to tweak his career-making, Tony-winning play as extensively as he has done.
“M Butterfly” has returned to Broadway after 30 years, not so much revived as revised.
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