I’ve been looking for a play to teach in my fall class, and I wanted something that wasn’t merely a classic Greek or Roman play or a very western-European-focused play such as an Ibsen. A little digging led me to David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. While Hwang is an American playright, he purposefully focuses on deconstructing myths of the “Orient,” using Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly, a true story of a disgraced French diplomat, and turning those myths on their head through a discussion of gender […]