(2 of 4)
Then, at a fateful dinner party just after Rich Relations closed in 1986, Hwang heard the story of Bernard Boursicot, a French diplomat who for nearly two decades carried on an affair with a male Chinese spy he professed to believe was a woman. Boursicot even claimed to have thought he had fathered a child by his "mistress," and when confronted in court with evidence of his partner's true gender, refused to accept it. "I knew right away that this was for me," Hwang said. Where others saw in Boursicot's story one of the odd corners of human life, Hwang perceived in it -- or reinvented it to be -- a reflection of decades of megatrends, from the French fiasco in Viet Nam and the waning of imperialism to '60s Maoism in both China and the West, from feminism to male chauvinist backlash. "What interested me most from the start," he recalls, "was the idea of the perfect woman. A real woman can only be herself, but a man, because he is presenting an idealization, can aspire to the idea of the perfect woman. I never had the least doubt that a man could play a woman convincingly on the stage."
Having found an idea for a play with which he felt completely attunded -- "I also knew it would not hurt in commercial or career terms to be able to create a great part for a white male" -- Hwang struggled to find a structure that would keep his audience at a comfortable distance from the sexually threatening story line. One day, as he was driving past a Los Angeles record store, he recalled the opera whose title he and his friends so scornfully invoked in college. "I hit on the idea of deconstructing Madama Butterfly, and popped in on impulse. As soon as I looked at the libretto, I knew it would be fine." He finished a draft in six weeks, in Los Angeles and then in France, where he had gone to mark his first wedding anniversary.
M. Butterfly reached Broadway in March 1988, where it won the Tony Award as best play of the season, and has grossed $17 million so far. The show has also been mounted in London, where Anthony Hopkins is playing the character based on Boursicot, and in Buenos Aires and Hamburg. Remarkably for a nonmusical, it has been booked for major productions in Paris, Brussels, Oslo, Copenhagen, Rome, Madrid, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, Sydney, Auckland, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, San Juan and New Delhi. This makes Hwang the first U.S. playwright to become an international phenomenon in a generation, since the heyday of Edward Albee. Dozens of film companies have bid for the rights. Says Hwang: "I guess the play is the thinking person's Fatal Attraction, a reflection of the fear between men and women and a kind of intellectual striptease. It's also about the West's fear of how its relationship with the East is changing. Sophisticated American whites realize their group is in the process of changing from an outright majority to just a plurality in the U.S., and are beginning to be ready to hear what the rest of us think."