Breaking down the fourth wall and the use of a play within a play was a choice by Hwang to better cement the themes and to give him the ability to allude to outside material. I have my issues with this play but its meta-quality does allow us to better understand the characters and their personalities, even though action and dialogue will always do this genuinely better, in my opinion.
When telling the audience about Madame Butterfly, Gaullimard gives us a look into his own personality from his reaction to the opera. “Don’t we who are men sigh with hope? We, who are not handsome, nor brave, nor powerful, yet somehow believe, like Pinkerton, that we deserve a Butterfly.” (p10) I believe this underscores the main themes this play attempts to play around with – control and expectation. Gaullimard is like Pinkerton in the way that he views women, particularly Asian women. And it is the romanticized notion of the Orient described in the retelling of the opera that intrigues Gaullimard to pursue and exhibit control over the Chinese actress Song. Gaullimard is, it is fair to say, ugly, hesitant, and shy – a wiener, if you will. He is someone who lives a mediocre existence, married to a less-than mediocre wife. What helps him along is playing out a fantasy within his own life. Can you blame the guy? It is only that he cannot foresee the long and hard consequences…
My big beef with the play is that it takes too long in Act 1 to retell Madame Butterfly. All writers steal their ideas from somewhere. It’s just that you have to shape those ideas your own way, to personalize them and hopefully add on to them. It almost irritates me to know that Hwang uses the opera as such a big crutch to explain the character of Gallimard, however. All this is in light of the fact that he leans so heavily on the real-life events written about at the time.
And how else is there to tell a story that leans so heavily on outside ideas than by taking a distanced view of the events through a meta-narrative? I do not think it is possible for this story. Well, never say never, but the logistics of the whole thing would be very hard, and so he gets credit for tying it together.
I can imagine how the initial concept of writing the play unfolded. He read some newspaper article and had the bright idea to retell it, only to realize, having been enlightened by a friend, that it would be too similar to Puccini’s opera. So, why not just throw it in for reference as well? One could visualize the play in this way: a legless man - perhaps a eunuch - supported by two crutches with the ability to fly.
(ps. the title is perhaps in bad taste, no, it is in bad taste. it is used simply because it reflects my frustration.)
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