M. Butterfly
David Henry Hwang
San Francisco Playhouse
From his small, sparse cell in a Paris prison, a former French diplomat to China — one who is serving time for treasonous passing of secret information to a planted spy posing as his lover — replays in his racing mind their twenty-year relationship. Telling himself “I have known and have been loved by a perfect woman,” Rene Gallimard struggles balancing fantasy and reality as scenes run through his mind of his life with a beautiful, Peking opera singer who, true to the traditions of the thousand-year art form, is a man dressed as a woman. Based on the real-life, 1986 trial of Bernard Boursicot, David Henry Hwang’s 1988, multi-Tony-Award-winning M. Butterfly opens in a stunningly conceived, incredibly multi-layered, and breathtakingly acted production at San Francisco Playhouse.
From his cell, Rene Gallimard invites us as an audience that he often directly addresses to enter into his collisions of actual memories and fantasized encounters, his recreations of scenes from Pucinni’s opera Madame Butterfly, and his own history of an attempt to recreate the opera’s storyline by finding and living with his very own Butterfly. Alone in a cell, his mindscape unfolds in both elaborate and intimate scenes that seem to pump another day’s life blood into his imprisoned self while also increasingly tormenting him as he comes ever closer to facing the truth and of who his Butterfly actually is. Complexly intertwined into his mental recreations are confrontations with and illuminations about cross-cultural stereotypes, the fluidity of gender identities, the power of desire, and the chokehold longing for love.
Dean Linnard is singularly excellent in the role of an oft-awkward Rene who alternates between being hesitantly reserved and being suddenly over-dramatic and who admits that he was once voted “least like to be wanted at a party.” In his cell, he is one moment trapped in harsh reality and in the next, imaging himself in a scene of Puccinni’s masterpiece. As a panorama of events — real and not — explode all around his mind’s eye and on the stage before us, Dean Linnard’s own eyes are a movie screen of Rene’s near-manic switches between one memory/fantasy and another — eyes that pop, dart, paralyze in place, melt to near puddles, or escape to somewhere far away.
Rene recounts the scene at a diplomat’s house where he first sees Song Liling re-enacting the final death scene of Madame Butterfly. From their first meeting, we begin to realize that the outwardly demure, delicately graceful Song is perhaps not at all at in the core the submissive, always striving to please Oriental woman that too often has been the Western world’s stereotype (and is at the heart of Puccinni’s depiction of Butterfly).
Edric Young gives a tour de force performance as Song, finding a myriad of mesmerizing ways to lure us and Rene into her command. She never just walks but rather floats across the stage. Whether in a scene of opera or pouring a cup of tea, Song is a millennium of learned traditions. However, as a an undercover agent seeking information about the nascent stages of the Vietnam war, Song is clearly cunning and calculating and in command. The boundaries between Song’s planful manipulation and her own deep feelings for her Western target of state secrets are not always straightforwardly clear — at least in the imaginations of Rene — as are so strikingly, sensually, and emotionally portrayed in a scene where Rene stages in his mind finally coming face-to-face with the maleness of Song.
Surrounding these two stellar principals is a cast of nine others who make their own marks in various parts of Rene’s dreams and memories and who also play multiple ensemble roles from a wall of pictured pin-up girls that come to life to solitary figures dashing through a city’s darkened streets of rain to socialites dressed to the hilts at the latest embassy party. Andre Amarotico is a hoot as Rene’s cowboy-and-clown acting pal of old, Marc, who shows up repeatedly in Rene’s dreams — usually uninvited — trying to egg the more reserved Rene into a sexual encounter or an extramarital affair. Elena Wright is Rene’s wife, Helga, who is the devoted and somewhat bored diplomat’s wife who is not so happy being in China — until she is not. Her Helga has a scene in a tub full of bubbles smoking a cig that is one of the night’s funniest highlights.
As Rene’s boss and French consul in China, Mademoiselle Toulin, Stacy Ross does what Stacy Ross always does so amazingly well — speak in her smoky voice with an air of overall nonchalance that is peppered with sudden smirks and inserts of surprise quips. Anthony Doan is the bumbling note-taker, Comrade Chin, whose first act of hilariously trying to capture all the information Spy Song is learning transforms in Act Two into a monstrous, truly vicious, Cultural Revolution zealot.
Amanda Pulcini plays with aplomb and snap a sexy side-trip for Rene — also named Renee — as he is deciding when and how to win over Song as his real-life Butterfly. Renee’s comments about his and all males’ manliness is laugh-out-loud fun.
As San Francisco Playhouse opens M. Butterfly, so much has shifted in these near-four decades since the play’s premiere on the world’s East-West stage as it becomes ever cloudy where dominant global power now resides. Understandings and acceptances of multiple definitions of gender identities are almost night and day different than in the late 1980s. Racism, sexism, nationalism, and political differences are now issues of grave concern in ways both sadly similar but also shockingly different than at that time.
Clearly understanding these shifts, Director Bridgette Loriaux has boldly reimagined this ’80s’-written play for a 2026 audience. First, the director has leaned heavily into humor during the first act, finding repeated ways to draw laughter from us as audience within the context of a play that is overall, deadly serious. Having fooled us a bit, the director then unsettles our comfort by challenging our own stereotypes of West and East, our own senses of what is real and what is wished-it-were-real. The multi-layered worlds of Rene’s dreams are enhanced by much employment of staged movements as scene setters and scene interrupters (with the production’s director also acting as choreographer).
Shifting screens both opaque and translucent and set pieces whose entrances and exits become parts of cast members’ dances and moves are only a small part of the overall magic of Randy Wong-Westbrooke’s set design. Keiko Carreiro has designed costumes that themselves are often show-stoppers — from Song’s array of elaborately stitched and colored opera attire to the multiple changes of evening wear that cast members find themselves.
Original music composed and played by David C. Warner magnetically draws us into an Oriental heritage thousands of years old, only to find ourselves next in a scene of designer gowns, champagne glasses, and tittering laughter over latest gossip. The result is we are at times a bit confused, at times caught off-balance, and at times faced with questioning what fantasies are we hanging on to about what we hope is real and what is actually not real in today’s fast-shifting world.
The only moment where I felt a bit of letdown was unfortunately in the final scene. As roles shift and Rene finally becomes the Butterfly for whom he so yearns, that transformation lacks the dramatic impact that I have seen in earlier productions where Rene physically becomes the true embodiment of Butterfly. The finale’s tragedy misses the operatic ending that his imagination has dreamed in past productions and thus does not seem — to me at least — as ‘tragic’ as it could be.
That said, there is so much at which to marvel, to contemplate, and to admire about Bridgette Loriaux’s interpretation of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly — especially given the two, award-worthy performances by Dean Linnard and Edric Young in yet another San Francisco Playhouse winner.
Rating: 4.5 E
A Theatre Eddys Best Bet Production
M. Butterfly continues through March 14, 2026 in a two-hour, forty-five minute (one intermission) production at San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available online at www.sfplayhouse.org or by phone at 415-677-9596.
Photo Credits: Jessica Palopoli
