Word: boursicot
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Then, at a fateful dinner party just after Rich Relations closed in 1986, Hwang heard the story of Bernard Boursicot, a French diplomat who for nearly two decades carried on an affair with a male Chinese spy he professed to believe was a woman. Boursicot even claimed to have thought he had fathered a child by his "mistress," and when confronted in court with evidence of his partner's true gender, refused to accept it. "I knew right away that this was for me," Hwang said. Where others saw in Boursicot's story one of the odd corners of human...
...Butterfly reached Broadway in March 1988, where it won the Tony Award as best play of the season, and has grossed $17 million so far. The show has also been mounted in London, where Anthony Hopkins is playing the character based on Boursicot, and in Buenos Aires and Hamburg. Remarkably for a nonmusical, it has been booked for major productions in Paris, Brussels, Oslo, Copenhagen, Rome, Madrid, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, Sydney, Auckland, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, San Juan and New Delhi. This makes Hwang the first U.S. playwright to become an international phenomenon in a generation, since the heyday...
...scene: Peking 1964. French Embassy Accountant Bernard Boursicot becomes enamored of a graceful Chinese opera singer named Shi Peipu. She returns his affection, bears him a child and induces him to engage in a little low-level spying on behalf of the People's Republic...
Paris 1986: Surprise! Shi Peipu was a male transvestite who somehow managed to perpetrate a 19-year hoax on the unsuspecting Boursicot by faking femininity and pregnancy and providing a baby boy who had been bought from a doctor in the Xinjiang region. Boursicot claimed that he did not discover the truth until he was arrested by French intelligence agents on charges of espionage. After hearing the strange case, seven judges last week sentenced both the hapless accountant and the former dancer to six years in prison. Their "son," Shi Dudu, now 20, was in the Paris courtroom...
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