These classic plays have been considered racist and harmful to Asian Americans. How are Philly productions reclaiming that in 2024?

How do you solve a problem like a classic? Some Philadelphia artists are trying to figure it out.

Madame Butterfly, the tragic Italian opera from 1904, and The Good Person of Setzuan, the moralistic German play from 1941, arrive on Philadelphia stages this month telling epic tales about the pain and struggle of the human condition. Both carry the praise and baggage that comes with achieving classic status. In these cases, that includes a legacy of racist and sexist portrayals of Asians.

These popular works deliver fantastical interpretations of Japan and China from Europeans — Italian composer Giacomo Puccini and German playwright Bertolt Brecht — who never visited those countries themselves. They crafted their own impressions of these cultures, powered by storylines that exoticized and objectified Asian women, reinforcing stereotypes of them as meek and inferior.

The butterfly Cio Cio San, a 15-year-old geisha, is demure, naive, and submissive. The good person Shen Te is a gullible sex worker.

For decades, these productions have cast white performers to play these central roles with their faces painted yellow, using makeup to elongate their eyes, and costumes of rice hats and silk. As theater and opera companies have modernized over the last century, they’ve found it harder to ignore that racist history for entertainment’s sake and name recognition.

Confronting the history of Madame Butterfly and Good Person of Setzuan today, Asian American artists promise reclaimed productions to critique those legacies for modern audiences. For Butterfly’s production designer Yuki Izumihara, that means challenging opera’s status quo.

“The comment that we get is, ‘Let it just be entertainment and just enjoy Puccini’s beautiful music,’ [but] we have a responsibility, we are given opportunities to express our voice,” she said. “... maybe it’s time to graduate from this opera, and invest more in a [new] canon piece for Asian and Asian American people.”

Puccini’s story begins with U.S. Navy officer Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, who wants to take a Japanese wife and marries Cio Cio San. She’s immediately besotted, he’s mostly indifferent. Pinkerton leaves soon after the wedding, leaving his wife to raise their son alone. When Cio Cio San learns that Pinkerton has remarried an American woman and that the couple intends to take her son away, she is heartbroken. Devastated, she gives up the child and kills herself.

In 2019, Opera Philadelphia set course to program Madame Butterfly for the eighth time in its 49-year history, this time told from Cio Cio San’s perspective. The Ted Huffman-directed production was canceled with the rest of the season due to the pandemic. Amid nationwide critiques of systemic racism across arts institutions in 2020, Opera Philadelphia created a community council of Asian artists, scholars, and opera fans to serve as advisers for a new, more inclusive production.

Izumihara watched a production of Madame Butterfly in 2019, which made her uneasy. But given its fame as one of the most produced operas in the world, she was hesitant to criticize it then. “I wasn’t fully comfortable to say, ‘Oh, I have a big problem with the opera,’ because I was starting up my career,” said Izumihara, an immigrant from Japan who now lives in Oakland. “I had to be a lot more nuanced, so I watched my mouth.”

In 2022, learning that Opera Philadelphia welcomed a less traditional approach, she pitched a concept where Cio Cio San is represented through a doll at first, then a puppet (created by local Chinese artist Hua Hua Zhang) for the majority of the show. Karen Chia-ling Ho, a Taiwanese soprano, sings the “Spirit of Cio Cio San,” splitting the character in two — a malleable, obedient puppet that Pinkerton, and by extension Puccini, fantasized about, and a real person attempting to meet those expectations.

The production also brought on a different director: Ethan Heard, for whom Butterfly was familiar terrain. The son of a Chinese mother and white father, Heard is a cofounder of the New York-based Heartbeat Opera, which produces modern takes on classics. He premiered his own critically acclaimed version of the opera in 2017, which presented the story through the eyes of Cio Cio San and Pinkerton’s son. At the start, the boy researches geishas, Orientalism, and yellowface before learning his parents’ tragic story.

It was a way of pointing a finger back at opera audiences who have long accepted yellowface. Opera companies remain comfortable continuing that tradition, Heard points out: the Metropolitan Opera is currently running Turandot, Puccini’s other Asia-set production, with a Russian soprano playing the Chinese princess.

“The Japanese characters [in Opera Philadelphia’s production] are played by Asian and Asian American performers. I don’t think we should take that for granted, because it’s not happening everywhere,” Heard said. “America has reckoned with Blackness and blackface to a certain extent, but has not really reckoned with yellowface. We allow it for Turandot because it’s more ‘fantastical’ than Madame Butterfly.”

Remaining true to Puccini’s traditional music, the Opera Philadelphia version still grants audiences a tragic ending, but it’s ultimately all a metaphor.

Brecht’s parable The Good Person of Setzuan follows sex worker Shen Te, who offers three visiting gods shelter for the night. They declare her a good person and give her a cash reward, but she struggles to lead a moral life in poverty. She invents a male alter ego, but it’s ultimately unsustainable. The play descends into chaos, and by the end, asks whether good people can ever exist.

Director Justin Jain has struggled with limited representations of Asians in theater over his 24-year career. He was told that he should aim for productions like Miss Saigon, the Vietnam-set retelling of Butterfly, as a theater student at the University of the Arts (where he first encountered Brecht). When the Wilma invited him to direct, he thought Brecht’s work was fertile ground for a pan-Asian production.

Jain saw Brecht’s reckless cherry-picking of Chinese culture as an invitation to make his own departures within limits, as approved by the Brecht estate. “That act — of not doing due diligence in exploring the story he was telling — suddenly gives me wild permission to be irreverent and fast and loose with how I express his Setzuan,” said Jain, who is Filipino American.

Set in a Filipino slum, Jain’s version cast the gods as obnoxious white tourists imposing their morality. He incorporated a melting pot of languages (Korean, Vietnamese), dances (tinikling and pandanggo folk dances from the Philippines), and instruments (like the Chinese zither guzheng). Using Brecht’s cultural ignorance as a launching pad, the production employs a dizzying array of cultural references that implicate the modern-day audience for their similarly limited awareness of Asian cultures.

The reworkings of The Good Person of Setzuan and Madame Butterfly infuse new messages that expose opera and theater’s shortcomings while making the case for the art forms’ continued resonance. After decades of the spotlight acting as a cudgel, Asian artists see the potential to heal through these reclamations. Now the question is when the performing arts world will make space for them to move on.

“The Good Person of Setzuan” is available to stream online through May 21 at wilmatheater.org. “Madame Butterfly” runs April 26 to May 5 at the Academy of Music, 240 S. Broad St., Phila., Pa. 215-732-8400 or operaphila.org.