The French have a certain reputation in sexual matters that assumes a more knowing or at least less conservative approach than Americans. After all, Francois Mitterand's wife and mistress both attended his funeral in 1996, standing side by side. One couldn't imagine that happening at the funeral of any president, even a Kennedy.
Yet in a sensational item of sex and espionage, a French diplomat was accused and convicted of supplying his Chinese lover with classified information. A Western man succumbing to the charms of an Asian woman isn't exactly news. After all, the dragon lady is a stock villain.
And such tales aren't unusual even today in Los Angeles where a high profile Republican fund-raising Chinese-born woman was accused last year of being a double spy. Although married, Katrina Leung allegedly carried on affairs with two of her white American FBI handlers.
But Leung is most assuredly a woman. News reports about French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and the Chinese opera singers, Shi Pei Pu told a different story. Boursicot claimed not to have known his long-time lover was a biological man.
The Play
On Broadway in 1988, this extraordinary espionage story opened up at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. David Henry Hwang, inspired by this odd little news item, wrote a play about Western imperialism and Eastern duplicity that would win him a Tony award. M. Butterfly was about a minor French diplomat who had a long affair with a Chinese Peking Opera star who just happened to be a man—something the French man claimed not to know.
This June, in an East West Players production (http://www.eastwestplayers.org/) at the David Henry Hwang Theatre, under the mischievous direction of Chay Yew, Alec Mapa, reclaims the title role that he took over for B.D. Wong on Broadway and played in the national tour.
Mapa doesn't look like a James Bond girl. He has the broad shoulders and thick somewhat muscular arms of a man. His Song Liling appears almost matronly. But in Los Angeles County where a certain married 50-year-old Chinese-born socialite was arrested last year as a double spy and was accused of having long-term affairs with two very un-Bondish FBI agents, we know that real spies look more like your average person than Hollywood stars.
Arye Gross is effective as the socially inept diplomat, Rene Gallimard, who marries a hilariously sexually inhibited older woman (Shannon Holt as Helga) as a quick step up the ladder via her father's connections. As he cruelly plays the cad with Song Liling, Gross convincingly becomes a braggart, swelled with pride. Though Gross is taller than Mapa, Holt's Helga towers over Gross in her heels so that she seems gawky while Mapa's Song is always sublimely graceful. Even at Gallimard's most arrogant moments, Gross plays him as neither suave nor particularly sexy. With a receding hairline and glasses, his Gallimard is an everyman.
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