The author
The creation of M. Butterfly began on May 11, 1986, with a report by The New York Times’ Paris correspondent.
“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. … Bernard Boursicot was accused of passing information to China after he fell in love with Shi Pei Pu, whom he believed for 20 years to be a woman. … Mr. Boursicot said their meetings had been hasty affairs that always took place in the dark. ‘He was very shy. I thought it was a Chinese custom.’ ”
The trial of Bernard Bouriscot and Shi Pei Pu
David Henry Hwang read the Times story and was convinced it had the potential to become a play. The then-28-year-old Angeleno had attended the Yale School of Drama for a year, dropping out of its graduate program when his plays began to be professionally performed at New York’s Public Theater and elsewhere.
Determined not to write a docudrama, Hwang did no further research into the news item. “Frankly, I didn’t want the ‘truth’ to interfere with my own speculations,” he wrote in an afterword to M. Butterfly.He even told Stuart Ostrow, who eventually produced the play, that he thought it could be “some great Madame Butterfly-like tragedy,” although he hadn’t yet made the conceptual connection between the opera and the real-life story.