M. BUTTERFLY
But there’s nothing lulling about Wisdom Bridge’s new mounting of M. Butterfly. Dispensing with most of the glitz and pseudoritual of the Broadway version, and embracing rather than denying the intimacy of the Wisdom Bridge space, director Jeffrey Ortmann has focused attention back where it belongs: on the words. Driven by Robert Scogin’s astringent and sensitive lead performance, Ortmann’s staging (on a simple, single-level stage backed by plain screens on which flowers are occasionally projected) clarifies and colors the script with a keen intelligence. Much more than either the Broadway premiere or the touring production that played here last year, this staging links Hwang’s sexual, political, and cultural themes in a convincing and thought-provoking way while bringing out Hwang’s darkly ironic humor.
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The actors at Wisdom Bridge are quite good. Scogin effectively uses his dry, droll drawl to narrate his own story as it’s happening, allowing Gallimard’s suppressed emotions to break through only occasionally, to powerful effect. Song is played by Ahmed Elkassabany–who forthrightly uses his own male name rather than the coy initials employed on Broadway by B.D. Wong and on the road by A. Mapa. This may be an acknowledgment of Elkassabany’s main drawback: he’s not a convincing woman. His voice is too low, and his arms too strong–a problem compounded by the ill-advised sleeveless dress he wears at one point (though in general Nanalee Raphael-Schirmer’s costumes are excellent, as are John Murbach’s simple scenic design and the lighting, by Barbara Reeder and Michael Rourke). That drawback aside, Elkassabany is an effective foil for Scogin’s Gallimard, gently hinting at Song’s “lotus blossom” frailty to snare the “white devil” diplomat. In the last scenes of the play he resists the temptation to overplay the openly male Song as a crude punk, coming off instead as just a cocky young actor who found himself quite literally in the role of a lifetime. Lisa Tejero uses her doll-like beauty to make Comrade Chin, Song’s spymaster, a frighteningly ferocious ideologue–not just a bully, as she was on Broadway, but a real woman emotionally committed to a self-perpetuating revolution. In M. Butterfly, the personal is political–and both are given compelling equal weight in this finely considered production.
