Thursday, October 26, 2017

"M. Butterfly" at the Cort Theatre

Clive Owen and Jin Ha star in M. Butterfly on Broadway.
Clive Owen and Jin Ha
Phoro Credit: Matthew Murphy

Playwright David Henry Hwang made an auspicious Broadway debut in 1988 with M. Butterfly. The play and its original two stars - John Lithgow and B.D. Wong -  received deserved awards and accolades. Almost thirty years later, the play remains overflowing with ideas and enigmas. The plot cannot help but grip an  audience with its strange and thoroughly engrossing fictionalized account of a true newspaper story about a French diplomat, convicted of passing top secrets to a spy over a period of 20 years. The diplomat had maintained that he never knew that the spy, also his lover - a Chinese actor and Beijing Opera diva - was a man. This provoking revival has been directed by Julie Taymor (Lion King) with tweaks and updates by the author.

Told in flashback from his cell in a French jail, the story of Rene Gallimard’s (Clive Owen) surrender to a bizarre affair, that seemingly defies Western sensibilities, logic and rationale, is evocatively paralleled with the male-female relationship in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Evidently infatuated from the moment he sees the intriguing Song Liling (Jin Ha) perform the title role at the opera, the timid Gallimard is quickly swept away by the adoration and attention lavished upon him by the femme fatale with kimono.

In his riveting play, Hwang deftly exposes and explores the bridge that exists between Western and Eastern thought on every subject from race to class to sex to politics. But his play doesn’t dwell on the familiar clichés usually associated with East meets West. In fact, the more the relationship between Rene and Song appears harder to accept in light of their prolonged affair, the more Hwang appears to be probing complex feelings about Eastern and Western cultures specifically the chasm between assertive and submissive sex.

Focused more on Gallimard’s more private feelings (“Will anyone beautiful ever want me?”), the first half of the play is a little less compelling than the stunning denouement which exposes Song’s  own unashamedly revelatory account of the affair. As an empathetic observer, it is shattering to see the tragically deceived Gallimard descend into abyss of total fantasy and even madness.


Owen’s Gallimard is emphatically second rate yet we see him as the eager manipulator who envisions  himself, for the first time in his life, as confident lover rather than as the duped dummy he really is. For all his converging feelings and emotional ambiguities, Owen gives a restrained but totally convincing performance. It is certainly as assured and compelling as the one he gave a few season back in Harold Pinter’s Old Times, his Broadway debut.

Certainly more extravagant in its concept, the role of Song is both cynically and excitingly portrayed by Ha, who is making his Broadway debut. I can’t imagine how the cataclysmic collision of Song’s feminine and masculine natures could be more thrillingly revealed than it is by Ha. Taymor’s crisp direction sweeps the action along, in and around designer Paul Steinberg’s often spectacularly painted panels that frame the play. Humor and drama weave through vivid scenes of traditional and post revolutionary Chinese operas as the cast moves from semi-detached narrative back into character and from fantasy to reality.

The often stunning costumes is the work of designer Constance Hoffman) Designer Donald Holder’s superb lighting enhanced both the intimate and the more extravagantly staged scenes. Choreographer Ma Cong gives the small corps of dancers a chance to shine in both the traditional Chinese Opera scenes with its martial arts and another that exploits the  fervor of armed Cultural Revolutionaries.

Murray Bartlett is excellent as Gallimard’s boorish friend as is Michael Countryman as Gallimard’s snide superior and in other roles. Enid Graham is appropriately frosty as Gallimard’s wife Agnes. Celeste Den, making her Broadway debut, is standout as a stereotypical member of the Cultural Revolution. These minor characters make significant impact in a powerful and mysterious play that is as fascinating to contemplate as it is entertaining to watch.

"M. Butterfly" at the Cort Theatre 138 W. 48th Street  

Friday, October 20, 2017

Torch Song Opened October 19 2017


Torch Song
Mercedes Ruehl and Micharel Urie
Photo: Joan Marcus



Torch Song by Harvey Fierstein is making a sentimental if not quite a sensational  return to its Off-Broadway roots. This time uptown. Originally comprised of three related one-act plays (with their genesis more notably downtown than midtown), it became a hit in 1982 at the Little Theatre a small Broadway house where it continued a long and successful life under the umbrella title Torch Song Trilogy. In its original run Fierstein play the principal role of the drag queen Arnold. Unloading the Trilogy from the title and compressing the three parts into two doesn’t really remove the feeling, in the current production under the direction of Moises Kaufman at the Second Stage, that the play’s three parts, however compellingly presented, are distinctively different in tone, temperament and style.

Trimmed of its original combined length of nearly four hours to a little more than two and one half hours, the play remains a complex comedy-drama about a young man’s search for love and to be a part of a respected family unit and despite living as a homosexual on the fringe of normalcy. This theme is explored with an extravagance that is both exhilarating and enervating at the same time. It is the story of Arnold Beckoff, a drag-queen whose on-again off-again affair with a bi-sexual married lover becomes complicated when he becomes a foster parent for a gay teenage boy. This, to the chagrin of his Jewish mother whose unsettling visit becomes unexpectedly therapeutic.

That’s it in a nutshell, except that that nutshell is filled to overflowing with breathless and sometimes breathtaking monologues and some brutal confrontations that appear as both surreal and also quite ordinary. If the plot that covers more territory and more traumas than it can comfortably accommodate, it remains an emotional hodgepodge, an intensely personal story without the wider and perhaps wiser inclusion of social and political issues that Tony Kushner explored in his gay-centric trilogy Angels in America.

In the first play International Stud, Arnold, as flamboyantly played by the always astonishing Michael Urie, has the stage virtually to himself both in and out of drag. In a motor-mouthed monologue, Arnold shares with us his promiscuousness in his search for the right man in gay bars. This was 1974 before the awareness and the impact of AIDS s would curtail anonymous backroom sex. In such a bar where Arnold’s timidity (funny considering his profession) is funnily addressed with a semi-graphic encounter, Arnold has already met good-looking bi-sexual teacher Ed (fine performance by Ward Horton) destined to be his semi-partner in life.

A few years later in the more surreally imagined Fugue in a Nursery, Ed is comfortably married to attractive Laurel (nice impact by Roxanna Hope Radia) and has no qualms about inviting Ed’s ex lover to their summer home for a weekend in the country, especially now that Arnold has a new very handsome young lover Alan (very fine Michael Rosen.) Alan, however, finds it hard to resist the moves made on him by Ed. Various hanky panky and heart-to-hearts are played out by the couples on a very large bed.

The final act is Widows and Children First and takes place five years later in which a tragedy brings Ed to Arnold’s side but also to help him cope with the raising of 15 year-old David (Jack DiFalco.) Both seem to be involved in seeing that the very bright lad gets a high school education. What puzzles me is how the foster parents organization feels about or considers Arnold’s profession....or is Arnold pursuing another career that is not revealed?

What we do know very quickly is how Arnold’s mother (Mercedes Ruehl) feels about him and his life-style when she arrives for a visit. The acting by all during this final play is close to farcical as it takes place in Arnold’s apartment. Ruehl’s amusing, if also audience pandering, performance as a stereotypical Jewish mother can be most easily defined as sit-com reality. Cutting one-liners fly through the air as breezily as do the acrid recriminations and searing regrets. . .all neatly attached to the play’s over-the-top layer of sentimentality.

We have to surmise that director Kaufman (“The Heiress” with Jessica Chastain) knows exactly what he wanted to do with these three conjoined plays whose distinct personalities will forever be in conflict. This is typified by scenic designer David Zinn’s three functional purposefully incompatible settings. Perhaps the key to unlocking the play is revealed through the character of  Ed who, like Jennie in Lady in the Dark, just can’t make up his mind. Maybe that just doesn’t matter so much anymore in the light of our evolving and devolving obsession with modern sexuality. Thirty five years later, Fierstein’s Torch Song is still touching but also a bit tired. Simon Saltzman

Torch Song (limited run) at Second Stage Theater, Tony Kiser Theater (212) 246 4422