A Study Guide for David Henry Hwang's "M. Butterfly"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for David Henry Hwang's "M. Butterfly," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535827874

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M. Butterfly

David Henry Hwang

1988

Introduction

David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly is one of the most celebrated of recent American plays, and the first by an Asian-American to win universal acclaim. It was first produced in 1988 and won numerous awards, including the Tony Award for Best Play of the Year, the New York Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Broadway play, and the John Gassner Award for the season’s outstanding new playwright. M. Butterfly enjoyed a popular run on Broadway and when it moved to London’s Shaftsbury Theatre in 1989 it broke all box office records in the first week.

The play is based on a bizarre but true story of a French diplomat who carried on a twenty-year affair with a Chinese actor and opera singer, not realizing that his partner was in fact a man masquerading as a woman. The diplomat apparently became aware of the deception only in 1986, when he was charged by the French government with treason—it transpired that his companion had been an agent for the Chinese government, and had passed on sensitive political information that he had acquired from the diplomat. This almost unbelievable story stimulated Hwang’s imagination, and from it he created a drama that plays with ideas on a grand scale and manages at the same time to be witty and entertaining. Weaving into the play many parallels with, and ultimately ironic reversals of, Puccini’s opera, Madame Butterfly, Hwang explores the stereotypes that underlie and distort relations between Eastern and Western culture, and between men and women.

Author Biography

David Henry Hwang was born on August 11, 1957 in Los Angeles, California. His father, Henry Hwang, was a banker who had immigrated to the United States from Shanghai, China, in the 1940s, and his mother Dorothy, also born in China, was a pianist and music teacher. Hwang grew up in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles. He enrolled at Stanford University in 1975, where he developed an interest in play writing. It was while he was at Stanford that he wrote his first play, F.O.B. The letters stand for fresh off the boat, and the play explores the contrast in cultural attitudes between a recently arrived Chinese immigrant to California and two Chinese-American students who have long since assimilated American ways. The exploration of the interaction of Eastern and Western culture was to become a prominent theme in much of Hwang’s later work.

Hwang directed a performance of F.O.B. at Stanford in 1978 while he was still