M. BUTTERFLY by David Henry Hwang

Song Liling, a trained Peking opera singer turned spy, and René Gallimard, a French diplomat, carry out an elaborate 20-year affair that involves a tucked penis, a fake pregnancy, and multiple charges of treason in David Henry Hwang’s recipient of the 1988 Tony Award for Best Play.

This play touches on gender, race, sexuality, politics in a way radical and yet still specific to its time. When “Butterfly” debuted on Broadway in the 80’s, audiences wanted to know: Was Song Liling a man or a woman or neither? How did Gallimard fall for the illusion the whole time?

Staging their story now in 2026, our team, led by the visionary Bridgette Loriaux, asked: in this age of information and hyper-visibility, what happens to people when we turn their lives into content for our consumption — entertaining, delicious, and not finished until their bones have been picked apart and sucked dry? To what end can or must we modernize this play?

As someone who as a child earnestly pored over the books of the Bible desperate to know once and for all the reason for my existence, I’m fascinated by our human desire for certainty, even at the expense of truth, and the safety we find in the illusion of it. Perhaps that’s precisely what draws me, draws any of us, to art. Which is less about the answering of questions as it is the acknowledgment of the limits of what we know to be true.

Do we need answers to a question for it to be worth asking? Do we miss out on a communion with a divine Unknowing by flattening our experiences into yes and no, comprehensible and unthinkable?

A question on the top of my heart while preparing to play Song: was the love between these two people real? What love means differs from person to person. Did their love map onto my, Edric’s, experience, idea, beliefs about what constitutes love? No. Was it real to my Song and the illustrious Dean Linnard’s Gallimard in our production? Absolutely. Both can be true.

To more love.

-Edric