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 and mistaken sexual identity. …

Mr. Bouriscot was accused of passing information to China after he fell...