M. BUTTERFLY
But can he play Rene Gallimard? Well, that’s not so easy to picture. The befuddled protagonist of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, Gallimard is not only a good deal older than Anglim can hope to seem, he’s also infinitely less poised. This is a man whose grammar-school classmates voted him “least likely to be invited to a party.” A man who won’t go to the one party he is invited to–even though it’s a guaranteed orgy–because he’s afraid he’ll be rejected. Gallimard the adolescent has so little self-esteem he can’t even seduce the fantasy girls he finds in dirty magazines. Gallimard the adult becomes the biggest joke in France when he’s jailed for passing state secrets to a Chinese opera singer with whom he’s been carrying on a mad love affair these last 20 years, never realizing she’s not only a Mata Hari but also a man.
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So Anglim’s not really wrong for the role. If anything, A. Mapa’s Song Liling disturbed me more: I found his drag look unconvincingly hard. B.D. Wong’s Broadway portrayal was so much sexier. But that’s my problem, isn’t it? The point is that Gallimard and Song Liling could be played by a pair of hippopotamuses and M. Butterfly would still shiver with fascinating paradoxes. The point is that this play is a masterpiece, having fulfilled the primary requirement for masterpieces–which is to be endlessly capable of sustaining variation, never running out of or forbidding interpretations but always supplying new possibilities. Always offering new ways of seeing itself and of being seen.
