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M. ButterflyM. Butterfly is a 1988 play by David Henry Hwang, which deals with themes about cultural stereotypes of East vs West (see Orientalism), and is loosely based on the real life relationship between Bernard Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu. The play was inspired by the opera Madame Butterfly. The main character (Rene Gallimard) is a civil servant attached to the French embassy in China. He falls in love with an effeminate male opera singer (Song Liling), deluding himself that Liling is a woman. (Note that in traditional Beijing opera, women's roles were performed by male dan, or specialists in feminine roles.) The singer spies on Gallimard for the Chinese government, but, unwilling to risk losing a lover, turns out to be a fairly ineffective spy. The Frenchman slowly goes insane as he tries to convince himself he is actually in a relationship with a woman, in the face of unavoidable evidence to the contrary. Liling is so happy to be treated as an actual woman, and not as a crossdresser or otherwise transgender person, that s/he goes to great lengths to reinforce Gallimard's fantasy world. Eventually the Chinese spy is sentenced to a forced labor camp for sexual deviancy and Gallimard commits suicide rather than face reality. The original cast featured John Lithgow as Gallimard and B.D. Wong as Song Liling. David Dukes, Anthony Hopkins, Tony Randall, and John Rubenstein also played Gallimard during the original run. The play was made into a 1993 movie directed by David Cronenberg.
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