Last week, I had the privilege of interviewing Peter Kazaras, director of Seattle Opera’s Madama Butterfly (sold out opening & Key Arena simulcast tonight), and Angela Davis-Gardner, author of the book Butterfly’s Child. Or rather, I had the privilege of sitting in as they interviewed each other. Sometimes, as Kazaras says, you have to know when to get out of the way!

Peter Kazaras is both a singer–he’s a tenor–and a director, both the Director of Opera at UCLA and the Artistic Director of Seattle Opera’s Young Artist Program. Angela Davis-Gardner is the author of four books, and is quite knowledgeable about Japan, having taught there at the beginning of her own career. Butterfly’s Child is her second book set in Japan, and, as you may have surmised, is a continuation of the opera. It’s a study of familial relationships (for instance, what’s it like to raise the kid your husband had with another lady?), and is a well-told and richly imagined story in its own right. It’s a book well worth seeking out, especially if you enjoy the opera.

Kazaras and Davis-Gardner, who had previously never met, got on famously. That’s why they ended up playing the opera version of “Shoot, Screw, or Marry.”

PK: The book [Butterfly’s Child] just came out this year, right?
ADG: It came out a year ago, 2011.
PK: Is this the first production of Madama Butterfly that you’ve been involved with?
ADG: Yes. I’ve listened to Butterfly over and over and over again since I was a teenager, and I listened all the time I was working, very intensely, to different productions, but yes, this is the first one.
PK: We’re doing a production that we first did in 1995, but we’re doing our own thing with it–it is extremely spare. That’s its real strength, there aren’t a lot of bells and whistles. It’s about what the characters are doing, and I have to say, in my typical persistent, patient style–all the things I was not as a performer but you have to be as a director, you know–we’re really working with them on moment-to-moment-to-moment. What has he really said here, what has she really said here, why are you reacting that way? Not to say that doesn’t happen in other productions, but when that’s all you’ve got going on, you really want to make sure that stuff is clean.

ADG: And the spareness allows more of that to come through. Also it feels very Japanese, and contemporary.
PK: That’s right. I wanted to complement you on one thing about the book. A lot of people have said, “Oh, it’s like a page-turner,” and I have to say I found it exactly the opposite. I made it take me a long time, because I found it sort of like a picaresque novel–
ADG: Yes, it is–-
PK: And it’s Dickensian-–
ADG: Thank you!
PK: I mean, I wouldn’t dream of speed-reading Bleak House, and with this, it wasn’t like I had to finish it all in one night. I made it last a good long time.
ADG: I’m so glad, that’s a great compliment. And that you thought it was Dickensian is great.
PK: Well, it came from the era.
ADG: Yes. And that was one sort of novel I read so much when I was young, and it was sort of an instinctive feeling to write that kind of book.

PK: Do you know the game shoot, screw, or marry?
ADG: No, I don’t.
PK: You have to be careful in how you describe this to someone…There are many metaphysical implications of this game. For instance, well, name three classic male movie stars.
ADG: Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman, and Clint Eastwood.
PK: Okay, shoot, screw, or marry? Which one do you shoot because you don’t need him? Which one do you want to have a passionate affair with-–
ADG: Oh, Nicholson. I’ll s-sh-–
PK: Shoot.
ADG: Well–hmm…
PK: Oh, there you go! Do you really want to wake up every morning with that next to you? That’s the thing!
ADG: All right, I guess I’d shoot him.
PK: You know you’d screw Clint Eastwood and marry Paul Newman. You had to marry Paul Newman! All right, so you then could say, okay, Wagner, Verdi, Puccini–very interesting.
ADG: Right. What do you say?
PK: I don’t know, that’s a hard one for me.
ADG: You love Wagner–you’re about to do The Ring.
PK: Yes, I know, but the thing is–in terms of personality? Shoot Wagner. Without question! Puccini, affair; marry Verdi.
ADG: Me too!
PK: Because he was a great guy. And Puccini was sort of tormented, but darkly sexy…So. If I were playing shoot, screw, or marry with the big three Puccini operas, there’s no doubt in my mind that I would shoot Tosca, because–give me a break. On the other hand, [La] Bohème is a part of one’s life because it is just in one’s DNA, it is perfect, it is great, and you have to live with it. But man, do I want to screw Butterfly.

PK:…I just have to say, you are also Dickensian in the way that you allow for the possibility of redemption [in the book].
ADG: That was really important to me. When I got to the point in the story where I realized that the opera is sweeping the country in 1906, 1907–
PK: Brilliant!
ADG: I thought, well, what am I going to do? It was a real problem for me as a novelist. Here are these Pinkertons, walking around, and surely someone would go to the opera and say, “Hey!”
PK: So was that based on the actual Chicago premiere?
ADG: It was. I found out when the actual premiere was at the Met, and then it swept the country–
PK: So when was the first production at the Met?
ADG: 1906, with Geraldine Farrar.
PK: And [Enrico] Caruso.
ADG: Right. So I got [to this point], and I thought, “My novel is either over, or I’ve got to incorporate this.” So that was the hardest part of the novel–what to do?
PK: Brilliant. And it also gave you a great reason to get them out of where they were.
ADG: Get them out, and also give Pinkerton a chance for redemption. And that was my favorite scene to write, with him at the opera, seeing the opera.
PK: Fantastic. It was great. Brilliant scene.
ADG: I’m so glad you liked it. Thank you.
PK: How did you get the big idea?
ADG: There was a performance of Madama Butterfly at North Carolina Opera, and I went with a friend of mine who also loves opera. She turned and said to me, “I wonder what happened to Butterfly’s child?” And I thought, “Oh my God, that’s my next book.” I had just finished a book set in Japan, I know the culture quite well, and it just fascinated me: the quest, the complications of the family. The first problem I had to solve was, what were Kate’s motivations? And Pinkerton’s? And how would it be to live in a family with your husband’s mistress’s son? As a novelist, my main interest is relationships between people, and in families particularly. And also, I was very interested in the opera: the genesis of it, and the story, and how I might tweak it a bit.

PK: You really did try to make all the details of this as accurate as possible, it seems. What sorts of research did you do?
ADG: In Nagasaki, I talked to a man who’s written a history of Butterfly, and what’s accurate and what’s not. Of course I did a lot of research about the genesis of the opera. I had a Japan Foundation research grant to go there, and my former students guided me around and interpreted. They arranged a geisha party, where I was the guest of honor. Now, this is quite unheard of, for a woman to be the guest of honor at a geisha party. One of the geishas spoke fluent English, and I was able to ask her any question at all about geisha life.
PK: This is not a Japanese production, but it’s very important to me, in terms of the way some of the music is composed, that there is a movement vocabulary that needs to be observed. A certain serenity and joy that you need to start with. But I’m wondering, did you ever have the moment where you asked a question and a room full of people suddenly turned away from you [as happens in Act I of Butterfly]?
ADG: Yes.
PK: Oh my goodness!
ADG: Yes, well, the first question I asked like that was to my students–I went to Japan loving the opera, and we were sitting around one day, and I thought, “Well, this will be a good question,” and I said, “Have you seen the opera Madama Butterfly? What do you think of it?” One of them later said, “We don’t like that opera.” They love the music, but hate the story.
PK: Do they hate the story because of cultural inaccuracies?
ADG: I think it has to do with the power between Japan and America, for one thing–
PK: Especially in Nagasaki.
ADG: And our history. That’s a big part of it. But also, it was the characterization of Butterfly, which offends them. Because she’s presented as a geisha, and a geisha would not fall in love with Pinkerton. A courtesan might have fallen for him and taken advantage of him, but a geisha wouldn’t have put herself in that position. Not unless Pinkerton had been in the city for a long, long time, and had a real sense of the culture.
PK: Fascinating.

ADG: Did you internalize your first experience of Butterfly [as a tenor singing the role of Pinkerton] in your directing?
PK: I did internalize some experience, and that’s the experience of the music. For me, body plastique is extremely important. The way you use your body, your body language, the way you mould your body to the situation, and when it is appropriate to go with the music, and when it is sometimes appropriate to resist the music. …I’m always dealing with how people hold themselves. When you direct, your job is to get everyone on the same page. I’m not particularly interested in dictating every move. I want to see what they’re going to do, and then we’ll find the things that are right.
ADG: What alterations or considerations do you have to make [for the simulcast]?
PK: Here’s the thing. My job as a director, as I said, is to get everyone on the same page, and then to know when to get the hell out of the way. We’ve thought about times when it would be nice to get everyone lined up in a shot, but mostly I haven’t done anything that I wouldn’t do [otherwise]. The one thing that doesn’t work is a blank screen, and there’s that 8 and a half minutes at the beginning of Act III. If you’re doing an intermission, you can come back, start with the curtain down, and raise it when the sun comes up, as Puccini indicates. But we are doing Act II and Act III together –
ADG: That’s how it originally was.
PK: Exactly. So I thought, What are we going to do? …And we actually have a whole choreographed thing for [Butterfly], and it really goes by fast, and it’s beautiful. It’s character-driven. It’s movement, based on her emotion, and the story, and what we’ve seen. She does certain things that we’ve seen happen to her.
ADG: You can’t imagine how thrilled I am to see it. It’s like I’ve been dropped into the middle of a novel that I didn’t even imagine could have happened. Thank you.