David Henry Hwang's modern classic, M. BUTTERFLY charts the scandalous romance between a married French diplomat and a mysterious Chinese opera singer - a remarkable love story of international espionage and personal betrayal. Their 20-year relationship pushed and blurred the boundaries between male and female, east and west - while redefining the nature of love and the devastating cost of deceit.
Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe Award winner Clive Owen will star as Rene Gallimard in the first Broadway revival of David Henry Hwang's Tony Award-winning play, M. BUTTERFLY, directed by Tony Award winner Julie Taymor.
For the Tony Award-winning play's first Broadway return, Hwang will introduce new material inspired by the real-life love affair between French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and Chinese opera singer Shi Pei Pu that has come to light since the play's 1988 premiere.
Hwang's 1988 Tony-winning play is a critical-minded drama dissecting race relations, gender roles and international affairs - and also a gripping thriller full of sex, spying and disguises. Its seriously misguided and marred Broadway revival contains direction by Taymor, lead performances from English actor Clive Owen ('Closer') and Jin Ha (Chicago cast of 'Hamilton') and extensive, unnecessary and mostly detrimental rewrites.
'M. Butterfly,' which officially returned to Broadway on Thursday night with a marquee director in Julie Taymor, a big star in Clive Owen and a significantly revised script from Hwang, is now an entirely different and very complicated proposition. The power balance between West and East has been transformed: Hwang himself acknowledged this in his underappreciated 2011 comedy 'Chinglish,' a play that displays much ambivalence about the so-called new China and is very much in dialogue with 'M. Butterfly.' 'Chinglish' is all about another feckless Western man in a sexually compromising situation, this time in a wholly subservient role. China doesn't flutter. It roars with capital.
1988 | Broadway |
Broadway |
2017 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Production Broadway |
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