Author(s): Langley, Lee

September Highlights 2010

When the curtain falls on Puccini’s opera, Cho-Cho-San – Madame Butterfly – hands over her only child to his American father, and kills herself.Taking this searing moment as its springboard, Butterfly’s Shadow sends its characters spinning into a future undreamed of in the original.
At the centre of it all is the child, Joey, carried away by his father and new step-mother to a brighter future in America. But it’s not that simple. Each is haunted in different ways by memories of what really happened that day – Joey thinks he heard screaming, his father can’t seem to find peace, his step-mother has stumbled into a deceit that will destroy her happiness. But soon, they are caught in the shifting perspectives of a dramatic era – the Depression, Pearl Harbor, the horrors of war and, finally, the moment that time stopped in Nagasaki.
When the deadly dust of the A-bomb has settled, Joey finds his way back to the home of his memories, searching for traces of his mother. What he finds there will answer his questions in a heartrendingly poignant way.
Butterfly’s Shadow is a daring imaginative leap, a richly emotional story of thwarted love, lost hopes and self-discovery, set against some of recent history’s most dramatic events.