Arizona Opera's ‘Madama Butterfly’ confronts issues of whitewashing, representation
As a Japanese-American stage director of operas, Matthew Ozawa wasn’t a fan of “Madama Butterfly.”
“It was a piece that I’ve always had prejudices against,” Ozawa says. “I do think it’s a phenomenal opera, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a production that didn’t make me culturally upset and kind of offended. It turns into a very black-and-white nature of what the East and West is. When the East is only seen as submissive and servile, I have a huge issue, and when people are kowtowing and bowing and they’re in yellowface, I have a huge issue with that."
The Puccini masterpiece that has been criticized for propagating “orientalist” stereotypes as well as for decades of “yellowface” casting of white singers in Asian roles.
“For a long time I felt all Butterflys needed to be played by Asians, including the Suzukis and the Bonze and Yamadori and all those characters," Ozawa says. "I felt that very strongly, because I was seeing productions that I felt offended by because everyone looked so fake and pretending to be Japanese.”
Now Ozawa has staged “Madama Butterfly” for Arizona Opera — and without an Asian singer in the title role of Cio-Cio-San, the 15-year-old Japanese girl who is wedded, bedded and discarded by an American naval officer at the turn of the 20th century. Sharing the part are Sandra Lopez, a first-generation American Latina who recently starred in the Phoenix-based company’s “Florencia en el Amazonas,” and the Santa Fe native Rena Harms. The production plays Feb. 3-5 at Symphony Hall in Phoenix after opening Jan. 28-29 in Tucson.
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‘This could be a disaster’
Ozawa describes the experience of directing “Butterfly” as one of battling with the opera’s problematic performance history as well as with his own preconceptions, and his personal journey with the piece reflects how the opera world at large is negotiating the challenge of serving the multicultural audiences of today while performing works steeped in the cultural assumptions of the past.
“When they said we need to do a more traditional ‘Butterfly’ with a traditional set, I sat on it for a little bit, and I did ask a director friend of mine, ‘Look, I feel this is going to be very difficult for me to do.’ And we chatted about it, and suddenly I was like, ‘I have to do it. I’m half Japanese and half American. I’m meant to do this piece. But I have to find it for myself.’ I was like, ‘This could be a disaster for me personally and artistically. Am I going to be able to do something that’s not caricature and stereotype?’ Because that’s all I’ve ever seen. And so I put a challenge to myself.
“You grow as an artist out of discomfort. You have to keep pushing yourself.”
Protest and progress
Minority representation — in the sense of how people of color are depicted in the performing arts, but also the lack of opportunities for minority performers to portray complex characters that reflect their own heritage — is a hot topic of conversation in the industry:
- In 2015, the Metropolitan Opera in New York made headlines when it broke with a century of tradition by having tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko sing the title role of Verdi’s “Otello” without darkening his white skin with makeup, a practice that evokes the blackface performances of racist minstrel shows.
- This came a year after the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society drew howls of protest when it produced “The Mikado,” a satirical operetta set in Japan, without a single Asian performer in the cast. Months later, similar criticism of yellowface casting prompted the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players to cancel a production of the same show to develop a new, more culturally sensitive interpretation, which premiered this past December.
- Here in metro Phoenix, Arizona State University’s 2015 world premiere of “Guadalupe,” an opera about the patron saint of Mexico and the 16th-century conflict between that country’s native peoples and their Spanish conquerors, drew a small, peaceful protest of about a dozen students raising issues of cultural appropriation — and questioning the wisdom of having indigenous characters portrayed by mostly Anglo students.
- The representation issue has been even hotter in musical theater, with controversies erupting last year in Chicago and in Phoenix over the casting of “In the Heights,” “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway hit about a Dominican-American immigrant neighborhood.
‘The curse of opera’
“Our repertoire is riddled with this,” says ASU music professor Brian DeMaris. He serves as artistic director of the school’s Lyric Opera Theatre, which produced “Guadalupe” and presents student performances of both operas and musicals.
“I always say the curse of opera was that it was invented solely to show people how much wealth and power they had, and the curse of musical theater is that it came out of minstrelsy and the extremely racist art forms of the 19th century.”
DeMaris, who came to ASU in 2015, is an opera conductor, and “Madama Butterfly” was his first professional gig in 2005.
“At that point in my life and career, it never even crossed my mind that yellowface was an issue or yellowface was insulting to people,” he says. “But in my growth as an artist since then, and with the growth of our conversation in the artistic community, I look at that as a conflict.
“Here’s this amazing score and brilliant story and something that in Puccini’s time was giving light to the issue of the oppression of the female, of Asian culture, by white Western masculine culture. It’s an important story, but how it is portrayed is almost as much an issue as the story itself was at the turn of the century.”
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‘Cracking’ the script
Lopez, who will sing the role of Cio-Cio-San for the Friday and Sunday performances in Phoenix, has played the part several times in her career. She says that Ozawa’s interpretation might not look like a radical departure from past productions, but in rehearsal he challenged the familiar habits of how “Butterfly” has been performed in every scene.
“What’s been fun is rediscovering really genuine and spontaneous emotions that are sincere within Butterfly,” she says. “We were very careful to keep her completely three-dimensional.”
And not just Butterfly. Pinkerton, the American who abandons her and marries a white woman, is often portrayed as a villainous boor, Lopez says, but Ozawa challenged that assumption as well.
After all, to Puccini’s Italian librettists (Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa), America would have been almost as “exotic” as Japan, and the story reflects their cultural assumptions about both shores of the Pacific.
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Unlike Pinkerton, the military man’s new American wife usually is portrayed as selfless and pure. But not this time.
“I’ve always done it where Kate Pinkerton is sweet and really sorry that she’s coming to take the baby. There’s not a bad bone in her body,” Lopez says. “And yet all her actions in the scene speak differently. I had to go home and re-read the scene like 15 times, because I was like, ‘How have I never seen this?’ I just made her the most wonderful blond American lady coming to fix everything.
“I was very disoriented, because I’ve never played it like that. That really futzed with my brain, and it futzed with the whole scene. It’s like, we know how this scene goes. Wait, Matthew just cracked the egg wide open, and I don’t even know what came out. It was so authentic.”
Transcending yellowface
Authenticity, of course, is a performance ideal that can be difficult to realize in an opera that views Japanese culture through a Western lens. And the history of white singers performing the piece in yellowface only compounds the problem.
That’s why Ozawa used to agree that the Japanese characters in “Butterfly” should only be played by singers of Asian descent. So Arizona Opera’s diverse cast presented him with a dilemma. On the one hand, with his Japanese heritage, he is a stickler for cultural accuracy. On the other, he didn’t want to push the acting into caricature.
“Most productions of ‘Butterfly,’ they spend hours and hours on, like, the fan placement,” he says. “And then everyone’s really trying hard to indicate Japanese — what we think it is, but that is not what it is, because it would take a lifetime to actually learn to be it.
“We have a multiracial cast. OK, everyone’s going to be in kimonos. No one’s going to be in yellowface. But how do I work out my own issues with cultural appropriation within the context of this? You cannot expect that singers and actors are going to magically suddenly be Japanese. So I’ve had to pull it back and just sort of brush-stroke it a little. The way that people move within the architecture is much more linear for the Japanese, much more circular and free for anyone who’s not Japanese within the context of the show. There are little things that just give it the umph, without everyone having to be in yellowface, being super, like, (he affects a stereotypical accent) ‘He-he-he, so Asian.’ Indicating that we’re Asian. We’re not Asian.”
Color-blind vs. color-conscious
Ozawa says that the diversity of his cast — which includes Latinos and an African-American — helps in getting beyond stereotypes.
“It’s completely blind casting, so everyone’s multiracial,” he says. “If our Pinkertons were white, blond, blue-eyed Americans, this would be a lot more tense. The fact that everyone in the cast, including the represented Americans, are not necessarily Caucasians changes the whole playing field. No one is anyone’s ‘proper’ color.”
Color-blind casting has long been common practice in the opera, as well as in classical theater such as Shakespeare.
“How someone looks has traditionally been less important for casting in opera than how they sing,” says playwright and opera librettist David Henry Hwang. “Still, acting ability and a singer’s visual credibility have become more important in recent decades — hence, we are less likely now to see aging, obese tenors singing young, strapping romantic leads.”
Blind casting is one solution to promoting diversity. Yet it’s not the only solution, nor one that can be applied at all times.
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It may not be logically consistent with a color-blind ideal, but hiring white performers to perform “Porgy and Bess,” with or without blackface, would be unequivocally offensive. It simply isn’t done.
The same stigma has not applied to whites playing Asian or Latino roles, leading many minority performers to push back against color-blind casting — which has been used as a justification for an all-white “Mikado” — in favor of “color-conscious” casting.
This can mean casting roles “authentically” with actors who look the part of the Japanese characters in “The Mikado” or the Latino characters in “In the Heights.” But that’s not all it can mean.
Take “Hamilton,” Broadway’s smash-hit hip musical with a cast consisting almost entirely of people of color portraying America’s Founding Fathers. It might look like an example of blind casting, but it’s not blind at all. Having a dark-skinned Alexander Hamilton carrying the show is an aesthetic choice that both underlines and transforms the themes of the piece.
So color-conscious casting isn’t about cut-and-dried rules for who can play which parts. It’s about making sensitive, inclusive choices on a production-by-production basis.
The bottom line
It’s also about equal opportunity.
Hwang is best known for his Tony Award-winning play “M. Butterfly,” which was inspired by Puccini’s opera — and turns many of its assumptions about race and gender on their head. So he is well-versed in the nuances of multicultural representations on the stage. But that wouldn’t be his only concern about casting choices for an opera like “Butterfly” or Puccini’s other orientalist classic, “Turandot.”
“I see race-conscious casting today as more of an employment than an aesthetic issue,” says Hwang, writing via email from New York, where he is a theater professor at Columbia University.
“At least in the New York theater, if measured by Broadway and the major not-for-profit institutions, casts are 75 to 80 percent white,” he says. “I think this would be considered a bad diversity figure in most industries. As a result, I accept some aesthetic inconsistency: I like when traditionally ‘white’ roles are cast with actors of color, because that decreases the 75 to 80 percent figure, but dislike the opposite, because it increases that statistic.”
The issues at stake are complicated and manifold, which is why Ozawa — whose father was born in a Japanese internment camp in Wyoming during World War II — says he is still struggling with them.
“I am one of the only Asian-American directors in opera, and most of the companies I work for, I’m usually one of the only minorities in the building,” he says. “So I feel like I have been paving the way for change.
“A year-and-a-half ago I would have said, ‘People who are not Asian should not be bowing and kneeling in kimonos and pretending to be Asian in these shows.’ Now that I’m a little bit older and now that we’re in this process, I think that it is a really gray zone.
“I’ve been asked to possibly do ‘Turandot’ elsewhere, and I’m like, ‘Great! Bring it on.’ This is the next challenge to approach a piece that’s kind of offensive, and how do I crack it open? The most exciting thing for me is unlocking it in a way that I’ve never experienced the piece before.”
Reach the reporter at kerry.lengel@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4896. Follow him at facebook.com/LengelOnTheater and twitter.com/KerryLengel.
Arizona Opera: ‘Madama Butterfly’
When: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Feb. 3-4; 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 5.
Where: Symphony Hall, 75 N. Second St., Phoenix.
Admission: $25-$135.
Details: 602-266-7464, azopera.org.