Director’s Notes
by Kevin Morgan, from an interview with Director Yefim Maizel

When we are moved by the tragedy of Butterflys betrayal and death, I think that we connect the anguish portrayed on stage with our own painful experiences of love and life. Out of memories of our own humiliations and grief, we naturally have great compassion for one so young and innocent experiencing disaster on such a tremendous scale.

When the story opens, Butterfly, at 15 years of age, is already feeling desperate. The forces of family and culture have pushed her toward the role of a geisha, something stifling to her pure and open manner. The geisha enacts the role of the perfect Japanese woman, carrying in her posture, clothing, and every word and movement the art of a highly refined culture. Since the 17th century, the geisha’s purpose has been to create a dream world of luxury, romance, and exclusivity for her client - for a price. It is a tremendously demanding role, that of pretending love, and something that must have been terribly destructive to one who would gladly have given her authentic love, asking only for authentic love in return.

We know that Butterfly could never have been happy as a geisha, for if she had a true understanding of the motions of loving kindness without the emotions, she might have better understood the motives of Pinkerton. But as it was, her desperation to escape one world of artifice led her into another. Her naive belief that others were as sincere as she led her to embrace Pinkerton’s flattery enough to marry him. Perhaps many of us have felt the real-life pain, for ourselves or for someone we cared for, as openness and trust were overwhelmed by another’s desire for something completely selfish.

Many of us, having been taken advantage of, eventually came to understand what has happened. The betrayal of another, the heartache and humiliation, can make us forever wiser or forever bitter. Betrayals can close us off, make us a little more cynical, or as it has come to be called in this world, a little more ``realistic.’’ Herein lies some of the great brilliance of the story. We are at once judgmental of Butterfly’s denial in the face of the evidence, and yet somehow touched that there is a spirit so pure that it refuses to be compromised, refuses to be ``realistic.’’

What ensures the doom of Butterfly is that her undying devotion to Pinkerton, and thus in her mind all things American, has her lose the sustaining connection to her family and community. The tragedy of Butterfly’s devotion is not completely due to the clash of cultures, but to the loss of something much more personal and much more intimate that we can all relate to directly. None of us can survive the travails of life without staying in relationship to our created family and the community we choose. Again, our own pain at the losses in our lives of family and community has us feel compassion for Butterfly’s loss. We can only hope to have once been blessed with the gift of a devoted friend like Suzuki.

In the final scene, Butterfly’s illusions about life and love are so overwhelmingly wrenched from her that she can no longer continue to live. The tragedy is of someone who has lost child and husband, community and kindness, and her own sustaining beliefs in life and love; it touches us deeply.

Yet in a subtly ironic twist during these final moments of agony, Butterfly reclaims her roots. Having lost Pinkerton and her son, there is no need to continue to seem American. By committing harikari, she knows that giving her life in ritualized suicide allows her to honorably reclaim her own world. From our cultural point, we see only the horror of her death. But in fact, it is another brilliant moment of the opera - suddenly we are the ones betrayed by our cultural understanding. For Butterfly completes her life honorably, by making restitution for the shame she has brought on herself and her people.

In this production, I have offered the presence of an older and wiser Pinkerton as a way of honoring the value in our lives of reflection, insight and self-forgiveness. In the end, there is no one there to comfort Pinkerton, to forgive him his errors that ultimately destroyed a great light. Perhaps one of the greatest and rarest gifts taht we can ever have in life is the maturity and grace to forgive ourselves for the parts we played in the tragedies of life.