NEW YORK • Playwright David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly, about a French diplomat who has an affair with a Chinese opera singer, will be revived on Broadway later this year, with Clive Owen starring and Julie Taymor directing.

It will mark Taymor's return to Broadway after Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, a troubled 2010 production from which she was dismissed.

M. Butterfly won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1988, when it starred John Lithgow and B.D. Wong.

Hwang is making significant revisions to the script for the revival, incorporating recent discoveries about the relationship between Mr Bernard Boursicot, who was an embassy worker, and Shi Pei Pu, a man whom Mr Boursicot had believed for years to be a woman. The two were convicted of espionage in 1986. They were pardoned a year later. Owen will play the diplomat, named Rene Gallimard in the play.

Taymor won two Tony awards in 1998 as the creative genius behind the stage adaptation of The Lion King. Her most recent off-Broadway productions, including Grounded and A Midsummer Night's Dream, won significant critical praise.

NYTIMES