STAGE REVIEW : Seductive ‘M. Butterfly’ : Hwang Drama Finally Flutters Into Wilshire

The most distinguishing element of David Henry Hwang’s “M. Butterfly” is its concerted unity of purpose. Everything about this lush, award-winning conundrum is designed artfully to seduce, fascinate, perplex, mislead, astonish.

The production that opened at the Wilshire Theatre Wednesday--a virtual duplication of the late John Dexter’s 1988 Broadway version, reconstituted by producer-director Stuart Ostrow--takes its cue from the sweeping simplicity of the rich vermilion and black set by Eiko Ishioka. It greets us as we enter the theater like a lacquered Chinese box, empty, elegant and still, ready to surprise us with its secrets.

And they are many, because this is a play about the politics and infinite variety of deception. What you see is almost never what you get.

“M. Butterfly” is not so much based on as inspired by the stranger-than-fiction account of French diplomat Bernard Boursicot, whose Chinese mistress of many years turned out to be a man.

Not only did the diplomat not know his lover’s true sexual identity, which is bewildering enough (“she” even “bore” him a child), but he was duped into spying for him/her, which led to his eventual arrest.

This unlikely story provided Hwang with the perfect foil from which to fashion an intense, ritualistic deconstruction of the nature of appearance as reality. How could a man not know his mistress was a man? By falling waist deep, Hwang implies, into the “Madama Butterfly” syndrome--the Puccini opera that encapsulates all that is wrong with the West’s presumptuous, oversimplified, imperialistic view of the East.

And so we’re off with him on a multifaceted flight of fancy that begins in a French prison where Rene Gallimard, our diplomat, “patron saint of the socially inept,” is pondering the events that have bedeviled his life--in particular his amazing relationship with the Peking Opera star, Song Liling. We listen to his jumbled prison thoughts and watch the movie in his mind.

For once, to Dexter’s credit, the flashback is used with consummate speed and artistry to marry the sublime to the ridiculous, riffling through scenes of self-deprecating humor, luscious romanticism, martial arts and only occasional (and very faint) didacticism.

Gallimard’s meditation refracts through the prism of Puccini’s opera summing up Eastern and Western attitude through a simple enough exchange: “It’s a beautiful story,” Gallimard tells his lover about “Butterfly.” “Yes, to a Westerner,” is Song’s tart reply.

“M. Butterfly” is not about sexual identity per se, but rather about how it reverberates in the context of much larger issues of assumption and deception. The play focuses on the secret of Song’s true gender chiefly in the political sense, including, quite literally, the politics of the Vietnam War. What difference is there, it seems to ask, between Song’s fooling Gallimard, a man once voted “least likely to be invited to a party,” and the blunted arrogance that made American leaders underestimate their enemy in Vietnam? Isn’t it simply “Pinkertonism” at its most fateful?

The second and more fascinating act of “M. Butterfly” drives this point home in a sardonic series of movements and arias. They flesh out the piece’s musical parallels and dramatize its philosophical counterpoints in a ritual reversal of identities. The havoc wrought is as much a warning as a plea.

Philip Anglim brings a nervous timidity to Gallimard that richly illuminates his self-incrimination as an international bureaucrat of small imagination and large fantasies. But despite his articulate speech and that of A. Mapa, who plays a distinguished Song, female and male by turns elusive and imperious, wretched acoustics at the Wilshire Theatre made it impossible to hear either of them with any consistency opening night.

No one is credited with sound design, but people were complaining and the problem is real. It’s a monumental frustration that gets in the way of an otherwise mesmerizing production.

The balance of the company is competent, neither adding much nor taking away from a play that is fundamentally written for two voices--Song’s and Gallimard’s. But the director’s grandly stylish hand, Lucia Hwong’s soulful original music and designer Ishioka’s variously creamy and/or richly brocaded costumes, fill out a tapestry that, combined with his sumptuous set and Andy Phillips’ and Brian Nason’s delicate lighting, could be accused of playing into our collective Westernized delusions about the exotic East.

It is, however, only another layer in the play’s subtle power to deceive. Like the illusion proffered by Chinese nesting boxes, it is the production’s final, most seductive and most subliminal lesson in enduring misperception.

“M. Butterfly,” Wilshire Theatre, 8440 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 and 7 p.m. Ends Aug. 5. $17-$40. (213) 480-3232, (714) 740-2000. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes.

‘M. Butterfly’

Philip Anglim: Rene Gallimard

A. Mapa: Song Liling

Chris Odo, Francis Jue: Kurogo

Alma Cuervo: Helga

Jennifer Lam: Suzuki/Comrade Chin/Shu Fang

Linda Pennington: Renee/Woman at Party/Girl in Magazine

Kevin Cooney: M. Toulon/Man 1/Judge

Brian Reddy: Marc/Man 2/Consul Sharpless

Jamie H.J. Guan: Peking Opera Warrior

Producers Stuart Ostrow, David Geffen. Original director John Dexter. Director Stuart Ostrow. Playwright David Henry Hwang. Sets and costumes Eiko Ishioka. Hair Phyllis Della. Lights Andy Phillips, Brian Nason. Music Giacomo Puccini, Lucia Hwong. Production stage manager Joe Cappelli. Stage manager Artie Gaffin.