David Hwang’s ‘M. Butterfly’ Soars in N.Y.

Local playwright makes good. David Henry Hwang lives in Los Angeles but his major premieres have been in New York, and “M. Butterfly” looks like his biggest success yet.

It opened this week on Broadway, to mostly delighted reviews. Wrote Variety’s Richard Hummler: “This is an audaciously imaginative play and a satisfying instance of a talented writer hitting full stride.”

The plot--taken, incredibly, from real life--concerns an unobservant French diplomat who has a 20-year love affair with a Chinese-opera actress, only to discover, to his cost, that she is (1) a spy and (2) a man.

Hwang treats the situation playfully, but not lightly. His point, according to UPI’s Frederick Winship, is that the Western view of the Orient as “feminine and submissive” is dangerously out of line with reality.

Frank Rich of the New York Times found it a play of many meanings, like a nest of boxes within boxes. He praised Hwang for reversing the usual practice in American plays and enlarging a personal story into a “universal meditation” on the eternal opposition of male and female, East and West.

John Lithgow (the Frenchman) and B. D. Wing (the singer) got good notices from everybody, as did director John Dexter. There were some complaints about Hwang’s script being talky, but as the AP’s Mary Campbell pointed out, plays of ideas often are.

Howard Kissell of the New York Daily News was the only serious dissenter, and his point was that the play would have been more comfortable Off Broadway, in a less slick production.

WHERE’S ROSIE? That was the name of Eugene O’Neill’s beloved player piano, but nobody knows what happened to it when he and his wife Carlotta sold their California home, Tao House, in the late 1940s. The people restoring Tao House have placed a similar instrument in “Rosie’s Room,” but they would be thrilled to have the original. Write to Box 402, Danville, Calif. 94526.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK. David Henry Hwang, in the New York Times, on growing up in San Gabriel: “I knew I was Chinese, but I thought it was a minor detail, like having red hair.”