The play’s major revelations are all Ha’s to effect. Rene’s world opens up to true love and true desire, and when that is gone it literally closes in on him again. Paul Steinberg’s design-centered around the walls of the jail cell that collapse and fold outwards to form bigger frames and vistas, as at the opera, or Song’s apartment, or embassy cocktail party-is the stage equivalent of intricate origami. Rene is so desperate we don’t find out the truth of what has led him there-the real truth, the truth about Song-that he steps out of the play to plead that the narrative stops. His jailing, coming as a convoluted result of his relationship with Song and espionage intrigues, is a recurrent thread in the play.

That notion of freedom, as contrasted to confinement, is illustrated by Rene’s incarceration in jail. The play asks who is using who, who really has power, and-most importantly-what does each partner desire in each other, what do they need from each other and what element of escape does each signify for the other.

Both are in their own way misfits, both are vulnerable to their country’s masters, but it is Song who plays, most beneficially, the shadowy game of spycraft demanded of her. Ha is a precise, measured, and transfixing performer, and also a steely observer and critic of the benign-seeming imperialism that Owen embodies. Song will prove to be a far more formidable partner than Rene expected. He wants something else, someone else a walk on the wild side, though not as wild as his buddy Marc Pinkerton (Murray Bartlett, letting rip as a drunk and cad, a welcome high-energy puncture to the emotional melodrama). Owen is the perfect, slightly slapdash and messed-up foreign diplomat, tie askew, hair mussed, ready for a drink, and trapped not in an unhappy marriage but a useful and practical one. Song will not be that stereotype, far from it. Butterfly, when Song neatly skewers his racist expectations that she will be the meek and submissive Oriental flower. Indeed, he is a victim from the first moment of M. Here, Rene Gallimard ( Clive Owen) falls for Song Liling (Jin Ha, in a stunning Broadway debut), but Song is no victim that is the biggest redraft Hwang succeeds in drawing.

But Hwang takes important liberties with the complicated tale of desire and identity, set in the 1960s, and all the political upheaval and intrigues of that era.Īs an interpretation of Madame Butterfly, it is-thank goodness-the intelligent inverse of the racist and sexist Miss Saigon.

David henry hwang's m butterfly