August 31, 2006

• just watched the very excellent bay area rendition of M. Butterfly...very different from the film version:

  

   (can you believe how pretty this dude looks? oh how feminine you asian boys are ^.^ lol just kidding, don't throw stones at me!!)

  anyway, i went with little to no expectations. it's mountain view, after all, about as happenin' as cupertino, CA on any given day, and the production was done by a grassroots theatre company to boot (nothing like the oh-so-very-commercialized broadway.) in all, despite my reservations, it was quite impressive!

  j: do you think it's hard to find an asian guy willing to do this play?
  a: it's the bay area. there are a lot of asians...and there is SF.

   

  the cons? from the opening act, the play absolutely reeeeeked of "asian-american" agenda. then again, would you expect anything less of david hwang? M. butterfly opens with a fierce criticism of the puccini play Madame Butterfly (which, i'll have to say, does carry the unpleasant odors of imperialist thought, but come on, that was 1904!) M. butterfly's brings in the classic analogy: "imagine if a gorgeous blond homecoming queen marries a short japanese businessman...only to be abandoned by him three years later. when she finds out he has remarried in japan, she commits suicide in favor of marriage to a young kennedy! you, of course, would think she was a moron. but because in this case it was an oriental woman who kills herself for a western man, it's beautiful...a sacrifice." as the play progressed, a distinctly homosexual agenda was woven in (subtly though...so that you don't quite realize what you're being spoon-fed until the pepto-bismol is already coating your stomach.) M. butterfly: "so what? does it matter? this soft skin...this face...it's the same. this is what you were in love with all along. feel...it's the same soft skin."

  that being said, the acting was excellent, the dialogue was smart, and song liling's legs were, as expected, awesomely feminine. yes, much better than my own, especially in a high-cut qipao. you know, he was able to slowly chip at your defenses until you actually kind of thought he was a woman...until the end, when he stripped (all the way down!!), revealing a six-pack, biceps, and...well, genitalia we fortunately didn't have to see.

   

  and lots of food for thought that, out of the sheer triteness of it, i had placed on the back burner...truth v. fantasy (in most cases, where fantasy > truth), the dichotomy of asian woman/western women-

  r: nightclubs? i thought even in your own shanghai it was difficult to get into nightclubs...
  m: oh, you mean the "no dogs and chinamen" signs? don't be silly...you didn't come to shanghai to party with loud, big-thighed western women while slender lotus blossoms waited just outside the door, did you?

           -and the systematic defeminization of the chinese female during the cultural revolution (M. butterfly to the very masculine comrade chin: "THIS is what modern china thinks a woman should be like!")

   

   

  last of all, some awesome one-liners to make you want to see it more.

  m. butterfly: do you know why in chinese opera female roles are always played by men?
  female comrade: why?
  m: because only men know what they want women to act like.

  mark: yahhh she wasn't a great lay. i mean, the way she kept on waving her arms when she was on you and screaming "I'M COMING!" as if it was such big news, i mean, who cares-
  rene: oh, is that what she meant? i got scared because i thought someone was actually coming.

  ***

  btw, i just realized that some things are truly lost in translation. take Owen's famous poem "Dulce et decorum est," whose title is born from the latin phrase:

  "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori"...most commonly translated as
  "Sweet and fitting it is, to die for one's country."

  perhaps a stronger translation would be more literal however, sticking the words in the original order and placing the emphasis on the word emphasized in the latin (die)...

  Sweet and fitting it is, to, for one's country, die.

  yeah, nerdy aside

  • 2:45 am
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