Stage:

...Gallimard identifies with Lt...

...M. Butterfly originated in a news story about a French diplomat and his Chinese lover, a star of the Beijing Opera, who were found guilty by a French court in 1986 of spying for China...

...show business with, why not both at once...

...As a woman, he/she dominates Gallimard through submissiveness, milking him for the secrets she passes on to her superiors...

...So Gallimard becomes Butterfly...

...It is Hwang's imaginative construction of characters and events, filtered through the memories, the prejudices, the longings, the dreams of the French diplomat, here called René Galli-mard, and played as a very American Frenchman by John Lithgow...

...The only explanation for the diplomat's not knowing before is that he chose not to know anything that would interfere with his image of the ideal woman who loved him completely...

...Liling offers to continue the affair, but that would be play-acting for GalliBOOKS mard, not the idealization that has let him call his lover Butterfly...

...He paints his face, puts on Liling's discarded robe, and commits the necessary suicide, while Liling, now the repentant male, stands above and calls out in a broken voice, "Butterfly...

...Presumed dichotomy, actually, since the either/or is not mandatory...

...You could hardly tell from the current bland revival of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Circle in the Square, but the best American playwrights have always answered the question about seriousness vs...

...Gallimard is presented as a wimp who becomes sexually and professionally sure of himself because of his liaison with Liling, but in his other affair with a Westerner, it is the woman who is the aggressor...

...For all the private and public chaos that such an assumption has visited on the world, the play is not making so direct a comment...

...but since a change of costume is not a revelation, he finally strips so that Gallimard and the audience can see that he is a man...

...Less a jar than a Chinese box full of surprise doors and secret compartments, M. Butterfly is far removed from the skeletal news story...

...Most of the characters in M. Butterfly are caricatures who play brief scenes that underscore the sexual and political ideas which are more fully realized in the shifting relationship between Gallimard and Song Liling, excellently acted by B. D. Wong, in and out of drag...

...M. Butterfly is interested, dramatically and ideationally, in the difficulty of defining sexual and political roles...

...and in the play's parody version of the story Puccini borrowed from David Belasco and John Luther Long, Lithgow plays Pinkerton as a macho American stereotype, the coarsest kind of sailor on the make...

...Pink-erton, the hero-villain of Madame Butterfly, in his longing for the perfect and perfectly submissive woman...

...Now, in M. Butterfly, he has come to Broadway for the first time with a highly theatrical work displaying familiar Hwang devices and themes in a blend that unintentionally asks whether Hwang is a serious dramatist or a show-biz magician...

...In one of the teasing scenes in the play, Song Liling tells a female comrade who wears a sexless Red Guard uniform, that only a man knows what a woman should be...

...STAGE MADAME B. FROM PUCCINI TO HWANG In The Dance and the Railroad David Henry Hwang mixed Chinese opera and American history with such imagination and wit that the play established him in 1981 as an important new voice in American theater...

...Gallimard goes to prison and Song Liling goes back to China, but Gallimard keeps saying that he wants to find another ending-the right one-for their story...

...Butterfly...

...Which brings us back to the question in the first paragraph and the hope that seriousness and show business are not mutually exclusive...

...In a first transformation scene, Liling presumably becomes the man that he is, elegant in Western clothes...

...GERALD WEALESERALD WEALES...

...It is a wonderfully theatrical moment and it is possible that this scene-along with the Chinese opera battle, Liling's transformation, Wong's strip scene-will stay with the audience longer than the awful irony of the end and the implicit rejection of sexual and racial myths that it embodies...

...The trial revealed, to the apparent surprise of the diplomat, that the presumed mother of his child was in fact a man...

...Even if some of the more flamboyant moments in the production belong to director John Dexter and designer Eiko Ishioka, this dichotomy has been evident in Hwang's work since his first play, FOB, back in 1979...

...He wants to believe that a woman can so worship an unworthy man that, by Puccini out of Belasco, she can kill herself for love...

...In the Times interview, Hwang described the story as "a perfect little jar" to contain "concerns that I have about racism, sexism, and imperialism...

...The central male Western attitude- voiced more than once-is that woman wants to submit ("the eyes say yes while the mouth says no") just as the passive East, whatever its protestations, wants to be penetrated by the superior but beneficent West...

...Later that year, in Family Devotions, a "spiritual farce" by his own definition (New York Times Magazine, March 13 1988), Hwang proved so adept at broadly comic surfaces that some reviewers wrongly dismissed the play as an Asian-American sitcom...

...This is a conscious choice, I assume, not a weakness in Lithgow's performance...

...Female roles are traditionally played by men in Chinese opera, but when Gallimard, who first sees Liling singing Butterfly, finally visits her/him at the opera, she is playing a female warrior, besting the men around her...