Any director, designer, and cast of Butterfly must do something to establish the atmospherics of the setting and to acknowledge the behavioral differences between the Japanese and American characters. They must do so in a way that is authentic-seeming to a Western operatic audience and yet allows for emotional expression that is recognizable (and reasonably appealing—we must want to watch it) to that same audience. A consistent level of reality is also desirable. Hermanis, though, hides his Butterfly’s physiognomy behind Kabuki whiteface, and traps her behavioral responses in a series of plastiques that are presumably drawn from the Kabuki body language code, and which might be beautiful (though still coded) if presented by a performer native to those conventions. Other female figures, lavishly costumed, pantomime in the same language on the upper tiers of the set (by Hermanis with Leila Fteita), where they alternate with projected images, keeping a symbolic eye-dominant narrative whenever the ear threatens to take over.^(I) All this is magnified by the incessant close-ups that the video medium demands, and by the shot selections the video director (Patrizia Carmine) must perforce make. On the welcome occasions when the camera can pull back to a full-stage view, we see that some of it must have worked better in the theatre. But the relief is infrequent and brief.

In Act 2 of the Corsaro/NYCO production referenced above, a great impression was made by the self-Americanization of Cio-Cio-San. Suzuki was still her Japanese servant-companion self. But in dress and makeup, in her selection of wall decor, etc., Butterfly had thoroughly re-made herself into what she imagined an American, Christian wife would be, and when she brought in Trouble (as he was then usually called) for Sharpless to see, the child was dressed in full U. S. Navy dress whites. There were few dry eyes. I haven’t researched for any precedent, but certainly we in New York had none for this makeover notion, which redoubled the pathos of Butterfly’s tragically misplaced trust. There’s no shock in the idea anymore—other productions have incorporated all or parts of it, almost to the point of conventionalizing it. And that is something worth noting about Corsaro’s way of exploring character as the linchspring of interpretation: the ideas that emerge seem terribly obvious—almost indispensable—once enacted; yet they had occurred to no one before, because no one had been thinking that way. And today, any thinking of that sort as goes on (and some directors do work at “Personenregie“) gets buried in conceptualization and scholarly dramaturgization. That is approximately what happens here, but Hermanis at least goes far enough to loosen up the intimate scenes of the second act and make the proceedings more watchable. At the end, the Kabuki women return, their masklike faces dripping painted abstractions of tears, to ritualize the suicide, which dispenses with the behind-the-screen, sound-of-dropping-knife, dying-agony progression in favor of a full-frontal, sudden-death staging. The subtextual element behind this—that Butterfly’s Japanese identity is always there, and will win out in the end—becomes a ruling notion of the staging. But it’s there anyway. We always understand that that is, in part, what finally happens. To borrow the language of the semioticians: symbolically staging this subtext actually reifies the tragic climax, substitutes signifiers for the signified, and accomplishes the reverse of what is intended. The child, by the way, is 100% American, Scotch-Irish division—not a trace of Japanese blood. As I said with regard to Otello (see the post of 1/18/19): we used to have this stuff called makeup.