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It's an enchanted space I occupy.(1)
Mainstream American drama generally allows its audiences to slip into a passive role. With the exception of experimental theaters, such as the Living Theater, that rely directly on audience involvement and participation, dramatic productions tend to encourage their audiences to sit back and observe. Particularly on the Broadway stage, an audience comes with the expectation of entertainment without undue effort. The unsaid intention is to learn from the story, to watch and gather information about the characters, the plot, the themes, and to leave the theater with some distilled understanding, moral, or catharsis. If we apply Foucault's analysis of the prison system from his book Discipline and Punish, we begin to see that the theater and the prison operate in similar fashions with similar purposes: they are both "[architectures]...built...to render visible those who are inside...[architectures] that [operate] to transform individuals."(2)
Both observational theater and punishment rely on a psychoanalytic privileging of knowledge. As members of the audience, we assume that we can gather enough information from the actions of the entrapped figure to come away with a better understanding of the internal workings of people.(3) In this fashion, both the theater and the modern prison system attempt to "[function]...as an apparatus of knowledge" (Foucault, 126). Both institutions "[distribute] individuals in a space in which one might isolate them and map them" (144). The structure of the stage and the use of spot lighting isolate M. Butterfly's main character, Rent Gallimard, and allow the audience to "map" him without distractions. In such a situation, the only activity that the audience in the theater need perform is a close observation. They remain distant and removed, literally in the darkened house while the actors, the specimens of study, are under light.
M. Butterfly begins with this observational system. In many ways the play employs conservative theatrical elements that come from such mainstream modern dramatists as Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder, and Arthur Miller. Like Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie, M. Butterfly is a memory play with themes of illusion and reality, continual references to confinement, dramatic lighting and musical motifs for the characters; as in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and Arthur Miller's After the Fall, our narrator steps in and out of the...