Henry Hwang, David - Robert L. King (review date spring 1989)
Robert L. King (review date spring 1989)
SOURCE: King, Robert L. “Recent Drama.” Massachusetts Review 30, no. 1 (spring 1989): 132-6.
[In the following excerpt, King applauds the Broadway staging of M. Butterfly and deems Hwang's playwriting intelligent and reflective.]
David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly is deliberately seductive in its rhetorical strategies; striking theatrical techniques and a sensational plot gimmick lead audiences on until they are as likely to question their preconceptions about sexual, racial and cultural superiority as they can be in a theater. The precipitating incident, straight out of the newspapers, gave Hwang bait for the literal-minded; as epigraph to the text, a New York Times account appears:
A former French diplomat and a Chinese opera singer have been sentenced to six years in jail for spying for China after a two-day trial that traced a story of clandestine love...
[The entire page is 1427 words long]
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