Arun Rath: I want to talk about how this all fits into a broader artistic project for you. You've written a whole book about it called "Final Battle for Yellowface." But first, tell us about this re-envisioned Butterfly. The original, which I described a bit, is set around, I think, 1905, and it's set in Japan. Tell us about the new version.
Phil Chan: So, when the opera was written during Puccini's lifetime, the defining moment between Western civilization and Japan was Commodore Perry and the opening of Japan, known as the Meiji Restoration.
Rath: The forced reopening of Japan.
Chan: Yes, exactly. So, that was really within the Western imagination when Puccini was writing this opera. Whereas, from where we sit in 2023, probably the largest cultural defining moment between us and Japan is World War II: bombing Pearl Harbor, Japanese-American incarceration, and all of the geopolitical events and relationships since have been defined by World War II. So, that just felt like a more immediate and urgent setting for the opera.
I was also fortunate enough to host a Q&A at Lincoln Center with Arthur Dong about his film "Forbidden City, U.S.A.", which is a great short documentary that details the story of these Chinatown nightclubs in San Francisco that were Chinese-American spaces featuring Asian-American performers that were excluded from white spaces, and what that subculture was about.
And just thinking about a congruent setting for "Madama Butterfly", if you think about what is the geisha at the heart of the story? Well, the geisha is an artist, a performer in Japanese, so what if "Madama Butterfly", instead of being a 15-year-old geisha in Japan, was instead an American jazz singer in the forties? And how could this same musical story be grafted onto a congruent libretto that would fit a contemporary 21st-century audience that is very different than who Puccini was writing for?
A lot of my work, in general, is shifting these Eurocentric classics that were made by Europeans, for Europeans, and enlarging them for a diverse 21st-century audience, which includes white Americans.
You know, most white Americans don't identify as Europeans, so we're not actually doing anybody any favors by pretending that we're Europeans in this art form. Right? So, how do we get these works to resonate with who all of us are in the audiences we're presenting to, specifically here in Boston?