“M. Butterfly,” playwright David Henry Hwang’s 1988 Tony Award winner onstage at San Francisco Playhouse, is chockful of enough themes and references to make a theatergoer’s head spin, especially at first. Among them are international intrigue and the prelude to the Vietnam War and the age-old battle of the sexes and the ways in which it is reflected in the “East is East and West is West” dichotomy: “The West believes the East, deep down, wants to be dominated—because a woman can’t think for herself,” says Chinese opera singer Song Liling.
The show also covers the ineffable mysteries of love.
To explore the varied themes, Hwang follows a circuitous path, melding the Puccini opera “Madama Butterfly” (in which the diplomat Pinkerton falls in love with a Chinese opera singer) with the well-publicized 1986 true-life story of the Frenchman Bernard Boursicot, who had a 20-year affair with an opera singer while stationed in China and apparently never realized that she was a man.
The story is set in both the past and present. In a metatheatrical device, the main character, the Frenchman René Gallimard, narrates from his Parisian jail cell where he’s incarcerated for spying. He re-creates scenes from the early 1960s in China to later in the decade (up to the present) in Paris.
Still, “M. Butterfly” at its heart is a love story.
And despite a beautiful design (the spare, elegant set in shades of gold and black is by Randy Wong-Westbrooke) and direction (by Bridgette Loriaux that includes amusing, tightly choreographed scenes packed with excellent performances all around), this SF Playhouse production’s love story never feels quite convincing.
Actor Dean Linnard’s Gallimard, in a performance so wonderfully varied and so convincingly full of pent-up excitement and desire, seems not to be the Gallimard the story implies. “Women do not flirt with me,” he says, upon meeting Song for the first time. “And I normally can’t talk to them. But tonight . . .”
Yet we don’t see that shy boy in Linnard’s vibrant, commanding Gallimard. Wasn’t it that inner nerd that drew him away from his white wife to the beautiful young Chinese woman whom white men presumably exoticize and crave and dominate—his secret need to be, as he says, “a foreign devil”?
And Edric Young as Song is an interesting and puzzling casting choice indeed. He’s tall, with long, muscular arms and a broad, distinctively masculine-looking face and a false-sounding breathy delivery. His appearance and acting choices make it hard to believe Gallimard would not eventually realize the presumably delicate, devoted Song was male. If that seeming mismatch undercuts the love story at the play’s center, it does foreground one of the drama’s multiple themes: When Gallimard purposefully avoids phoning the apparently lovestruck Song, he says, “I felt for the first time that rush of power, the absolute power of a man.”
Under Loriaux’s inventive direction, the large-cast play, with its short interludes of operatic song and varied scenes that encapsulate so much of the political scene of the 1960s involving China, France and America, is endlessly intriguing.
And that’s whether you believe the love story at its heart or not.
“M. Butterfly” runs through March 14 at San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets are $52 to $145 at sfplayhouse.org.