butterflyx4

My final project for the One Story interactive fiction class (as final as final can get, which is never really completely final. It's... nano-quasi-final).

We were asked to write one particular scene from a story, and I chose the scene from Puccini's Madama Butterfly where we see Cio-Cio-San wait for Pinkerton. But I folded that scene with 3 other similar scenes from different adaptations of the story (The Toll of The Sea + M. Butterfly + Miss Saigon). 

I chose to write about this opera because, though the music is beautiful, I profoundly dislike the story, and this allowed me to take the narrative in a different direction, focusing on Cio-Sio-San's friendship with Suzuki.

Teacher: Nat Besnard

Notes: 

1. The refrain/chorus is from El Scorcho by Weezer, a reference to their album Pinkerton.

2. The Toll of the Sea was a silent film made in 1922 and featured Asian-American actor Anna May Wong.

3. M. Butterfly is a play by David Henry Hwang that premiered in 1988, made into a film by David Cronenberg in 1993, starring Jeremy Irons and John Lone.

4. Miss Saigon is a 1989 stage musical by Schönberg & Boublil (famous for Les Misérables). It is the 14th longest-running show on Broadway.