A Film Actor Takes Wing in ‘M. Butterfly’

The warmest new ticket on Broadway and its most talked-about play is “M. Butterfly,” written by a young Chinese-American author from Los Angeles named David Henry Hwang and based on the true story of a French diplomat who, beginning in 1960, had a 20-year affair with a Peking woman who turned out to be not only a Chinese communist spy but a man.

It sounds like the stuff of farce, “Charlie’s Chinese Aunt” with a whole new dimension of sniggering innuendoes and perverse plot turns. It is, in fact, a very seriously intended play with a great deal on its mind about the relationship between love and sexuality, about sexual identity and about the cultural differences between East and West.

“M. Butterfly” is drawing its throngs partly on the strength of its titillating premise obviously, but also on the reviews and the word-of-mouth acclaim for the central performances by John Lithgow as the diplomat, Rene Gallimard, and Los Angeles actor B. D. Wong, making a Broadway debut as Song Liling, the spying Butterfly.

Lithgow is no stranger to a role of enormous sexual complexity, having been nominated for an Oscar for his performance as the transsexual football player in “The World According to Garp” in 1982.

That was not his first film role. He had done several, including a small part in Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz” and Brian DePalma’s “Obsession” and in “Rich Kids” among others. But his sympathetic transsexual was the portrayal that lifted him out of the I-know-the-face-from-somewhere category and led on to “Terms of Endearment” and solid footing on the slippery slopes of Hollywood.

Lithgow is indeed yet another in that long list of overnight successes who have actually been working hard at their craft for years, getting better and better and waiting for that lift-off role (which is wonderful if it comes but, if you are working steadily and well, is not quite tragic if it doesn’t). He’d been at it 15 years before “Garp.”

He was, in effect, a theatrical child. His father, Arthur, ran the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., and Lithgow grew up amid theater folk.

“I figured to be a repertory actor all my life,” Lithgow said over lunch at Orso, an Italian restaurant favored by actors. “Broadway was a long way off and Hollywood was another galaxy altogether.”

He attended Harvard as a scholarship student in the Class of ’67. One of the scholarships was created by Jack Lemmon and is given annually to the most promising student in the performing arts. (It is a characteristically idiosyncratic Harvard business, since the college offers no performing arts degrees and all such activities were then strictly extracurricular.)

Lithgow was president of the Gilbert & Sullivan Society. “I sang lots and lots of G&S; but I also did a lot with the Harvard Dramatic Club--Tartuffe and Gloucester in ‘Lear,’ and I directed a lot. When I first got into the business, as a matter of fact, I was doing better as a director than an actor.”

He was the Ivy Orator, an old Harvard tradition of a humorous speech to cut the solemnities of Class Day. “It was the 25th reunion of the Class of ‘42, which was really the last of the prewar classes and I decided to do a musical documentary of the year 1942.

“I sang bits of ‘Paper Doll’ and ‘September Song’ and ‘You’re Either Too Young or Too Old’ and I found squibs from the Harvard Crimson from those days, which I read. You have an audience of 6,000, a little intimidating. It was supposed to be funny but it turned out to be very, very moving. Some of the alumni came up and said they’d written those squibs in the Crimson.”

Lithgow received a Fulbright grant to study for a year at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts and stayed two years. He came back to begin a Broadway career that included a strong personal success in “Comedians.”

Meg Simon, one of the casting agents for “M. Butterfly” and an old friend, sent Lithgow a script of “M. Butterfly,” circumventing his agent. “As with all unagented scripts, it sat there for three weeks,” Lithgow said. “Then it sprang to life in my hands as if it was demanding to be read.

“God, I couldn’t wait to do it. I called up and said, ‘What’s the story? When does it start?’ But they’d taken my silence for indifference and they’d offered it to another actor. For the first time in my life, I fought audaciously. I said, ‘You’re making a terrible mistake. There’s only one actor to play that part, and that’s me.’

“They came back a week later and offered it, and now I really was ambivalent. Nothing to do with the play itself. It’s just that it’s tough to do a play these days.

“The movies are a convenient way of making a lot of money in short chunks of time. In two and a half or three months, you can make enough to carry you through the year.

“In the theater, in the first place, you’re making a lot less money and you’re committing a lot of time. I’m committed through late summer and I may continue if it’s going well. But you’re also asking the same commitment of your family. We live in Los Angeles and have two small children, and it’s tough to uproot.”

His wife, Mary, is a professor at UCLA, teaching the history of economics, but is on sabbatical this year so they’ve been able to set up shop in Manhattan.

“I get up early and take the kids to school and then I come back to the apartment and sleep from 9 till noon. Phone off the hook, windows darkened, as much like night as I can make it. If I invade that schedule, I can tell it at the performance that night. The role is a torrent of words and you need voice, voice, voice. The audience may not notice it, but I know when I’m not up there and I’m straining.”

The reviews have been strongly favorable, but not unanimous. The Washington Post review was negative, which hurt business during their four-week tryout there.

“Two scenes were rewritten, but it was mostly cutting and staging.” The veteran British director John Dexter, who won a Tony for “Equus” and directed Olivier in “Othello,” has staged “M. Butterfly.” And a razzle-dazzle piece of theater it is, with a great black ramp sweeping down before a shell of Chinese orange. Two sets of shoji screens in the same color are pushed on and off by two stagehands in black, to create a series of spaces, with minimal suggestive props.

“The writing,” Lithgow says accurately, “is grandiose. It sprints from one level to another, reality, imagination, everything. The premise is far-fetched and implausible. Yes?” Yes. “Despite it’s being loosely based on reality; yes?” Yes. “But David (Hwang) gets you to accept the premise and then takes you into the interplay of emotions and ideas.” Yes again.

“The thing is it’s unexpected. No matter how much you know about the play going in, it’s unexpected.” Absolutely yes.

Lithgow’s dressing room guest book is already a Who’s Who of the entertainment industry. “Mayor Koch came last week; I guess that makes us official,” he says.

Gallimard, imprisoned and embittered in the opening tableau--the play is in the form of a flashback from the present--gives a fine, sardonic monologue about all the sexual sniggerings. Lithgow is off on his (and Hwang’s) flights of feeling and fancy, roaring, crying, crumbling, the betrayer and the betrayed, edging ever nearer the truths that have been lurking all the while.

He receives a standing ovation, which must be the sweetest review an actor ever receives, except perhaps the first good one. Lithgow’s first as a professional came from the Los Angeles Times’ Dan Sullivan, then reviewing for the New York Times.

“I was in a new play about Lincoln, by Lincoln Kirstein, in the summer of 1967. He said I was ‘a young actor with a future in the theater.’ I think that’s an exact quote. He may not remember it, but I surely do.”

There has been talk of Lithgow directing. He would like to and has discussed projects with producer Ed Pressman. “But the ducks have all been in a row for two years now,” Lithgow says, “and I keep taking these irresistible acting roles. I’ll do that until they become less challenging or I do them less well. Right now I keep saying, ‘I can’t let this pass.’

“The thing is that stage acting feeds you immediately. It stays fresh because you have the feeling every night that the audience is seeing the play for the first time. They’re starting fresh and so are you. It’s different every night.”

It is a familiar refrain but Lithgow thinks that he has the best of all his worlds, stage, film and television. “I still haven’t been more than a year and a half or two years away from the theater,” he said.

He is also still being offered the tough roles--the roles, as he puts it, that take him right back to danger and self-doubt. “Me and self-doubt are real good friends,” Lithgow said with a grin, “but the real danger in acting is worrying about how you’re going to come off, which isn’t quite the same thing as how well you’re going to do the role.

“My successes have come in roles I didn’t think I was capable of playing. The only thing you have to fear is fear itself.”