Critical Reviews of the Show (K'yundra)


New York Times, 1988
  • "Instead of reducing the world to an easily digested cluster of sexual or familial relationships, Mr. Hwang cracks open a liaison to reveal a sweeping, universal meditation on two of the most headed conflicts - men versus women, East versus West - of this or any other time."
  • "...the director stirs together Mr. Hwang's dramatic modes and settings until one floats to a purely theatrical imaginative space suspended in time and place."

The Christian Science Monitor, 1988
  • "The author and director mingle fantasy, stylization, and vernacular realism. The final transformation scenes are master strokes of theatrical invention and - in the acting of Lithgow and Wong - performance realization." 
  • "M. Butterfly is not a play for all tastes. But as the latest satire on East - West relations by the Chinese-American author...it finds Hwang in lively form."
  • "It greets us as we enter the theater like a lacquered Chinese box, empty, elegant and still, ready to surprise us with its secrets."
Image result for lacquered Chinese box

Rotten Tomatoes M. Butterfly (Movie), 1993

  • "The problem is not simply that Lone's drag wouldn't fool a baby. In the magnified intimacy of the camera's eye, it's clear Hwang doesn't really know who these unlikely lovers are. Metaphors can't carry a movie-flesh and blood is what's required." - David Ansen
  • "M. Butterfly is Cronenberg's least-known and most underrated work, far superior to his great cult hit, Scanners." - Matt Bailey
The New York Times, 2017
  • "But more important to the play’s intriguing and ever timely central thesis is the fact that Song is Asian, perceived as a fragile lotus blossom waiting to be plucked by virile white hands, like the doomed heroine of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” Gallimard’s favorite opera. Such, it seems, is the West’s vision of the East."
  • "Instead, the show has a grinding Brechtian self-consciousness throughout, which calls harsh attention to its less than subtle ironies."
  • "Such clumsiness [of the design] sadly undermines a play that remains urgently relevant. Anyone doubting that Gallimard’s pipe dream of masculinity is still with us need only consult recent reports of the behavior of Hollywood moguls and American presidents or daily accounts of the United States military in quagmires on foreign soil."


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