Our Town

Yes, for anyone who's wondering, that's the name of a completely different play. It was the first play I ever read that used metatheatrical devices, which was something that no one seems to have talked about very much. Particularly in Our Town, in the stage directions, it discusses specifics about props and scenery, which usually stage directions don't much go into, but in this case, they're very important. In Our Town, Thornton Wilder (the playwright) wants only the simplest props and little to no scenery to be used. For example, when the two enamored characters speak to each other from the second story of their houses (which are right next to each other, as far as I can remember), Mr. Wilder directs actors to stand on two ladders.

My point is, obviously there are no specific directions on keeping props to a minimum in M. Butterfly. Producers are free to use as complex of props or as simple of props as they like. In fact, the stage directions seemed to call for quite a few props, such as the magazines, him sitting down involves a chair, a desk, stamping papers, a stamp, doors, etc. However, in the short clip we saw, the one with John Lithgow, there weren't very many props, and the scenery looked like the background on the Dilbert comics. There also weren't very many extras, though this is more acceptable in a play. Even so, whoever produced that play was going through great lengths to make sure the audience knew it was a play, as though the dialogue needed any help.

In my sophmore high school English class, my teacher seemed to believe that when Wilder, who is the son of an American diplomat to China, oddly enough, directs the actors to use the simplest possible props, he's doing it partly out of his love for the abusrd. In fact, my teacher used this to link to the next two plays we read, which were The American Dream and The Zoo Story by Edward Albee. Given the Nature of M. Butterfly, I'm inclined to think that the same is true in this case. Never mind that the story is based on a true one, it's still a very absurd story. And Hwang is trying to make it even more absurd with metatheater. In a sense, he's doing what John Stewart Does: taking a strange or stupid story, and making it infinitely more so without changing it very much.