THE BUTTERFLY
The play is about a beautiful butterfly (Denise Dailey McCauley) who flies into a dark attic and gets trapped in a spider’s web. The spider (David Saperstein) claims he is starving and must eat the butterfly or die. But he is struck by her beauty and touched by her deep desire to keep her “appointment with the sun,” so he offers her a deal–he’ll let her go if she promises to lure two or three fat, juicy bugs into his web.
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So that’s the way it goes–the creative are too important to be food for the spider; the rest get off because they appeal to the butterfly’s vanity or to her sense of pity. As I said, I may be reading too much into the play–it is, after all, just a story for kids. But the lame ending does little to clarify matters. When the butterfly returns to the web, ready to turn herself in, the spider says he was just kidding–he won’t die if he doesn’t eat her. “You could have brought me hundreds of those creatures, but you didn’t,” he tells her. “You are truly good.”
