The playwright David Henry Hwang warned me, amiably, that he might duck some questions. His play “M. Butterfly,” the Tony-winning hit from 1988, was back on Broadway for the first time, and the production was feeling guarded: No, I couldn’t read the new version of the script. No, the director, Julie Taymor, would not do an interview.

Mr. Hwang would, though, and here he was in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel, a couple of hours before the first preview at the Cort Theater. Opening Thursday, Oct. 26, the show stars Clive Owen in the role John Lithgow had the first time around, with Jin Ha in the part that won a young BD Wong a Tony.

Inspired by the true story of a yearslong affair, beginning in the mid-1960s, between a French Embassy employee and a male Beijing opera singer who was also a spy, “M. Butterfly” is about race, sex, espionage, geopolitics — and the titillating question of whether it’s even possible to mistake the gender of one’s lover, as the Frenchman claimed to have done. In the play, which also borrows from Puccini’s opera “Madama Butterfly,” the diplomat Rene Gallimard is in love with Song Liling, an opera star who seems to him the ideal woman.

Song’s true gender was the meant-to-shock big reveal of the original Broadway production, directed by John Dexter. But in what Mr. Hwang, 60, called a “reverse meta situation,” the show’s success led to detailed coverage of the real people he’d loosely based his characters on. And by now, the play has been in the repertory for nearly 30 years. As Mr. Wong said by phone recently, “The cat is out of the bag.”