M Butterfly David Henry Hwang Born in Los Angeles in 1957 Studied drama at Yale amp Stanford Wrote M Butterfly in 1988 it premiered on Broadway starring John Lithgow and BD Wong B ecame the first Asian American to win a Tony Award ID: 801439
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Slide1
David Henry Hwang & M. Butterfly
Slide2David Henry Hwang
Born in Los Angeles in 1957.
Studied drama at Yale & Stanford.
Wrote M. Butterfly in 1988; it premiered on Broadway starring John Lithgow and BD Wong.Became the first Asian American to win a Tony Award.
Slide3Puccini’s Madame Butterfly
Premiered at Milan’s La
Scala
opera house in 1904.The plot is as recited in M. Butterfly—an American diplomat “marries” a Japanese woman for convenience, leaves her pining for 3 years, and comes back only to collect his son from her. She kills herself.
On of the most often performed operas in the world today.
Slide4Intertextuality
“The
need for one text to be read in the light of its allusions to and differences from the content or structure of other texts; the (allusive) relationship between esp. literary
texts” (OED).
Slide5Bernard Boursicot
The play is based on the true story of Bernard
Boursicot
, a French diplomat to China who was seduced by Shi Pei Pu and was blackmailed into passing classified documents to him.Shi procured a “son” for them named Shi
Dudu
.
Both Shi &
Boursicot
were sentenced to 6 years in prison, and both were pardoned early.
After his release,
Boursicot
settled down with a male partner.
After being released from prison, Shi is quoted as saying, “I used to fascinate both men and women. What I was and what they were didn’t matter,” and
Boursicot
is quoted as saying, “When I believed it, it was a beautiful story.”
Slide6Meta-Drama
Drama in which the
author self-consciously alludes to the
artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from dramatic conventions and narrative/performative techniques.Related to “breaking the fourth wall.”