An inversion of Puccini's ''Madama Butterfly,'' ''M. Wong), pulled his hocus-pocus in the boudoir, and he refuses to explain away Gallimard by making him a closeted, self-denying homosexual. Hwang isn't overly concerned with how the opera singer, named Song Liling (B. This playwright, the author of ''The Dance and the Railroad'' and ''Family Devotions,'' does not tease us with obvious questions such as is she or isn't she?, or does he know or doesn't he? Mr. Hwang's imagination, one of the most striking to emerge in the American theater in this decade, comes in, and his answer has nothing to do with journalism. When we meet him in the prison cell where he reviews his life, Gallimard has become, according to own understatement, ''the patron saint of the socially inept.''īut if this story is a corker, what is it about, exactly? That's where Mr. Hwang's fictionalized protagonist, by half-joking way of explanation. ''It was dark, and she was very modest,'' says Gallimard (John Lithgow), Mr. Not only had the French diplomat failed to recognize that his lover was a spy he'd also failed to figure out that ''she'' was a he in drag. Butterfly.'' Here was the incredible true-life tale of a career French foreign service officer brought to ruin - conviction for espionage - by a bizarre 20-year affair with a Beijing Opera diva. It didn't require genius for David Henry Hwang to see that there were the makings of a compelling play in the 1986 newspaper story that prompted him to write ''M.
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