Poster for Puccini's Madama Butterfly, depicting the show's violent end. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
In early March of 1900, as the first spring buds started to show in Central Park and the icy winds blowing across the harbor started to diminish, New York’s theatregoers donned their overcoats and hats to attend a new David Belasco production. Belasco was a legendary Broadway producer, director, and writer. Today there’s a theater named after him near Times Square; some say the ghost of Belasco still haunts it. But in 1900 the area that was almost (but not quite) known as Times Square was still a bit out of the way. This Belasco production opened in Herald Square, the heart of New York’s theatre district at the time.
The show was called Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan. Belasco wrote the play himself based on a short story by John Luther Long. One act, two scenes, it shared a bill with a farce called Naughty Anthony, also written by Belasco. The evening was a chance for lead actress Blanche Bates to flex her range and also show a little skin – or at least, what counted as skin back then. In Naughty Anthony she played a (gasp) stocking model. In Madame Butterfly she played Cho-Cho-San, a young Japanese woman in Nagasaki who has been waiting months, maybe more, for the return of her American husband, Lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton. The town’s marriage broker and an American diplomat try to reason with her. Pinkerton has ghosted. Face facts: the marriage was disposable, her husband is gone, she is single, better to marry the wealthy Japanese suitor who now calls on her. But no, Cho-Cho-San won’t hear it. Perhaps because of the blue-eyed child she now raises on her own; Pinkerton’s son, which he knows nothing about.
David Belasco is second from left, with the white hair. These other gentleman were "prominent in operating Madame Butterfly" according to the New York Public Library. Not entirely sure what that means. Source: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library.
The arrival of Pinkerton’s ship in the harbor marks the play’s turning point and the end of scene one. The scene transition, which was fully staged (no blackout, no curtains), is described in the script. Cho-Cho-San pokes three holes in her paper sliding door so that she can spot Pinkerton on his way up to the house and surprise him; one hole for her, one for her servant, and one for her child. She waits, and waits. The lights change to night. Stars come out. Dawn breaks. The servant and child have fallen asleep, but Cho-Cho-San still stands, haggard from her all-night vigil. Pinkerton arrives, a complete coward. He won’t even face Cho-Cho-San. His American wife, Kate, will, and she pleads with her to let them take the child back to America. Cho-Cho-San asks her to come back in fifteen minutes, and then commits suicide, slitting her throat with her father’s sword. She dies clutching her child to her chest, waving a tiny American flag in his hand; a scarf every-so-tastefully covering the gash in her neck.
The beautiful stage pictures and violent climax thrilled audiences. Belasco probably had to lean on those elements; the New York Times quipped the play’s story dragged a bit. The show probably would have slipped into obscurity - should have slipped into obscurity. Because honestly? It’s racist AF. The tragic story is offset by moments of levity where Cho-Cho-San uses American slang or mixes up English words, or when her servant uses Western furniture incorrectly. Cho-Cho-San speaks in a strange dialect, which was also used in the original short story; presumably, the author’s imitation of a Japanese-speaker attempting English. Example - when Cho-Cho-San spots Pinkerton’s ship in the harbor, she says to her son:
“This is the bes’ nize momen’ since you was borned!”
The entire play is like this.
To modern audiences, it reads a lot like a minstrel show (a type of theatre popular in the 1800s where actors played crude racist caricatures of African-Americans while wearing blackface makeup). In Madame Butterfly, every Asian character was performed by a white actor made up to look Asian. A classic example not of blackface, but of yellowface, as this painful tradition of white performers imitating Asian stereotypes is called.
Blanche Bates, the (very caucasian) actress who first played Cho-Cho-San. Here, she's wearing her costume from Naughty Anthony, which shared a double bill with Madame Butterfly. Source: Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library.
The thing is, Madame Butterfly didn’t slip into obscurity. Because later in 1900 the show was produced in London’s West End, where the cast also performed in yellowface and where the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini saw it, starting a chain reaction. Puccini took the flimsy story and made it timeless, crystalizing it in song and aria as an opera a few years later. That opera became a classic, performed regularly by opera companies all over the world. That classic became source material for two Broadway shows in the late 1980’s. One was a European musical set during the Vietnam War; the other, an American espionage drama (that was also pretty gay). The European musical had actors in yellowface, and the American playwright spoke out about it. His activism would inspire a different play; that play would be one of the biggest flops in Broadway history; and that flop would inspire another show that is finally getting its Broadway premiere this fall, two blocks down and one block over from the theater that bears Belasco’s name.
Catch all of that?
If not, I’ll be telling the story in greater detail in the coming weeks here on this blog. It’s the story about a Broadway play that boomeranged across time and space, both literary and physical. And when it finally returned to Broadway decades later, it brought along a controversy that forced New York’s theatre community to reckon with its history of yellowface. It’s the story of David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face.