Butterfly’s Trouble

In Butterfly’s Trouble, Trouble, son of Madame Butterfly and Lieutenant Pinkerton – two years old at the end of Puccini’s opera – is now a middle-aged and guilt-ridden man. He has returned from the USA, his adopted home, to Nagasaki, Japan, to discover the truth about his mother’s death. The date is August 7, 1945 – the day after the atom bomb blast that leveled the city. As he stands in the ruins of his Japanese mother’s house, looking at the devastation around him, contemplating suicide, he sees a vision: he has returned to the Spring of 1900, the year before his own birth. As in a dream, the spirits of Butterfly and Pinkerton come to him, and Trouble experiences the beautiful and tragic events that led to his mother’s death.