Born: 1957,
Los Angeles, California
Nationality: American
Genre(s): Plays
Personal
Surname pronounced "Wong"; born August 11, 1957, in Los Angeles,
California, United States; son of Henry Yuan (a banker) and Dorothy Yu (a
professor of piano; maiden name, Huang) Hwang; married Ophelia Y. M. Chong (an
artist), September 21, 1985 (divorced October, 1989); married Kathryn A.
Layng, December 17, 1993.
Education
Stanford University, B.A., 1979; attended Yale University School of Drama,
1980-81.
Interests
Violin.
Career
Playwright; director of plays, including A Song for a Nisei Fisherman, 1980,
The Dream of Kitamura, 1982, and F.O.B., 1990; dramaturg, Asian
American Theatre Center, San Francisco, CA, 1987--. Cofounder, Stanford Asian
American Theatre Project; Theatre Communications Group, cofounder, member of
board of directors, 1987--. Teacher of English and writing, Menlo-Atherton
High School, Menlo Park, CA, 1980; member of board of trustees, Pitzer
College, 1990--. President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities (member),
1994--.
Memberships
Writers Guild of America, PEN (member of board of directors, 1990-- ),
Dramatists Guild (member of board of directors, 1988--), American Civil
Liberties Union, Phi Beta Kappa.
Sidelights
Enjoying an unusually swift ascent to prominence in the theater, David Henry
Hwang gained widespread praise for his very first play in 1980 and went on to
earn a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Many of his plays refer to
the experiences of Asian immigrants and to East- West relations, leading some
reviewers to pigeonhole him as an Asian author. Yet he has also written a
science fiction libretto, a cable television program on Middle East/Central
American politics, and non-Asian plays. Hwang's Chinese-American heritage has
been both "a minor detail, like having red hair," as he remarked in
a New York Times Magazine interview, and the inspiration for most of
his successful plays. Mingling Chinese influences with those of his own
country and in the process addressing wider concerns of race, gender, and
culture, Hwang is "the first U.S. playwright to become an international
phenomenon in a generation," according to William A. Henry III of Time.
Hwang was twenty-one and just graduating from Stanford University when his
first play, F.O.B., was accepted for production at the prestigious
National Playwrights Conference at Connecticut's O'Neill Theater Center in
1979; the following year producer Joseph Papp brought the play to New York's
Off-Broadway circuit, where it won an Obie Award as the best new play of the
season. First performed at Stanford, the drama focuses on Steve, a young
Chinese immigrant "fresh off the boat," and the two Chinese-American
students he meets in Los Angeles, California. The male student scorns Steve,
preferring to renounce his Chinese heritage; the woman tries to accommodate
both traditions and becomes a pivot between the two men. Wrote Frank Rich in
the New York Times, "The subject of the evening is a very old one:
the price that minorities pay to assimilate in mainstream America. But David
Henry Hwang ... is too rambunctious to tell a familiar story in a tired
way." One unusual aspect of the play, Rich noted, is a technical
innovation: in the second act Hwang employs Chinese theatrical techniques to
present his characters as figures from Chinese mythology. Rich also enjoyed
the "comic verve" Hwang displays throughout and, while recognizing
some flaws of construction and characterization in the work, asserted that the
playwright "hits home far more often than he misses.... If West and East
don't precisely meet in FOB, they certainly fight each other to a
fascinating standoff."
Hwang's next two plays, The Dance and the Railroad and Family
Devotions, also focus on Chinese-Americans: the first examines two
nineteenth-century Chinese men working on the transcontinental railroad; the
second looks at a well-established Chinese-American family of the twentieth
century. Rich deemed Railroad "leaner" and "more
accomplished" than F.O.B., though similar to the earlier play in
its mixture of American comedy and oriental technique and its interest in
immigrant concerns. It explores the confrontation between a new arrival, Ma,
and Lone, who has been in America two years. Sold into servitude by his
parents after studying in the Chinese opera, Lone is a cynic who distances
himself from the other laborers with daily dance sessions away from camp. Ma
persuades Lone to teach him to dance, and during their workouts the two men
explore their pasts and share their thoughts on the future. Judging the play
"witty, poetic and affecting," Rich described Hwang as "a true
original" with a "startling and far-ranging theatrical voice." Family
Devotions also earned Rich's admiration, though the critic suggested that
Hwang loses control of his plot near the play's end. The farcical drama hinges
on the conflict between a wealthy, Americanized Chinese family of fanatical
born- again Christians and an austere, atheist uncle from Communist China who
comes to visit. Rich and New Yorker critic Edith Oliver both judged it
Hwang's funniest play yet.
Departing from the Chinese-American angle, Hwang followed Family
Devotions with a pair of stylized one-act plays set in Japan, jointly
titled Sound and Beauty. One, The House of Sleeping Beauties,
reinvents a novella by Yasunari Kawabata, making Kawabata a character in a
variation of his own story, which depicts a brothel of comatose virgins--
elderly men sleep beside the drugged women to learn to accept their own
mortality. In Hwang's version, Kawabata visits to research a book but becomes
increasingly involved in the place and thoughts of his own mortality despite
himself. The other play, The Sound of a Voice, pits a samurai warrior
against a bewitching female hermit in a forest. Thinking she has the power to
destroy men, he plans to kill her, but several weeks as her guest change his
heart, with unexpected results. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Dan
Sullivan judged The Sound of a Voice "a skillfully ordered and
beautifully written play" that combines the simplicity and mystery of
folk tales with an insightful look at male and female psychology. Rich,
reviewing both one-acts in the New York Times, found The Sound of a
Voice flawed by overemphasized symbolism and both plays hobbled by Hwang's
"efforts to duplicate the mood of Japanese literature and theater."
Even so, admitted Rich, Hwang "is not standing still." The critic
deemed Sound and Beauty "an earnest, considered experiment
furthering an exceptional young writer's process of growth."
Hwang suffered his first critical failure with the 1986 play Rich
Relations, characterized by Rich as "tired." Although not about
Asian- Americans, the play includes several other elements of Hwang's earlier
works: materialism and wealth, evangelical Christianity, a family at odds.
Noted Jeremy Gerard in the New York Times Magazine, "the
playwright didn't disagree with the charge" that he was treading familiar
ground. "Rich Relations was another attempt to write a spiritual
farce," Hwang told Gerard. "It's about my family--except that
they're not Asians." Ultimately the playwright found the flop liberating.
As he related in a Los Angeles Times article, "I felt I'd done
something I was pleased with and proud of--and everybody spat on it and I was
still happy I did it. That gives you tremendous exhilaration, because the next
time you want to pursue whatever it is you really want, it's not going to hurt
that much if people don't like it."
Hwang bounced back from failure in 1988 with the popular M. Butterfly, based
on a true story of a French diplomat and his Chinese lover, who turned out to
be not only a spy but a man. Debuting in Washington, DC, and quickly moving on
to Broadway, the play pleased audiences and many critics, earning a Pulitzer
Prize nomination and a Tony Award. Surprised by such success, Hwang told Los
Angeles Times interviewer Sylvie Drake that some of his play's appeal may
derive from its use of Italian and Chinese opera music. Also, he said,
"people associate a certain level of exoticism with the East; therefore
they'll come to the theater to see this." Hwang decided to give audiences
what they expected, "in spades, and at the same time try to subvert it by
talking about exactly why it is that audiences are attracted to this material at
the time that they are being attracted to it."
Hwang's strategy was to exploit parallels between the espionage incident
and the Giacomo Puccini opera Madama Butterfly, which tells of a
Japanese woman who falls in love with a Western man, is spurned, and commits
suicide. In Hwang's play, the diplomat, Gallimard, represents Puccini's
Westerner, Pinkerton; Gallimard's Butterfly is Song Liling, a Chinese opera
diva/spy in drag who appears to fall in love with Gallimard. To Hwang,
explained Rich, "a cultural icon like Madama Butterfly bequeaths
the sexist and racist roles that burden Western men: Gallimard believes he can
become `a real man' only if he can exercise power over a beautiful and
submissive woman, which is why he's so ripe to be duped by Song Liling's
impersonation of a shrinking butterfly." Hwang's parallel includes a
crucial twist: "At the beginning of the play," he asserted in a Washington
Post interview, "the Frenchman sees himself as Pinkerton--he's found
this beautiful Madame Butterfly in China. And by the end of the play he kind
of realizes that it is he, the Frenchman, that has been sacrificed for love,
that the spy was actually the Pinkerton who preyed on his love."
M. Butterfly drew both acclaim and criticism. Several reviewers
applauded its ambition, richness, and drama, while others found its
characterizations and plot twists unbelievable. Contrasting the work with
other American plays, Rich observed that "instead of reducing the world
to an easily digested cluster of sexual or familial relationships, Mr. Hwang
cracks open a liaison to reveal a sweeping, universal meditation on two of the
most heated conflicts--men versus women, East versus West--of this or any
other time." In another New York Times review, however, John Gross
judged M. Butterfly better as a personal tragedy than a wide- ranging
play of ideas: he called it "a mess, intellectually speaking," but
admitted that "at its best it sweeps one up in a tense emotional
drama." In the New Yorker, Edith Oliver described the play as
"funny, mysterious, and often beautiful" and labeled Hwang the most
"audacious, imaginative, [and] gifted" young playwright in America.
Hwang exercised his imagination in a different genre with another 1988
drama, a science fiction collaboration with composer Philip Glass and scene
designer Jerome Sirlin entitled 1000 Airplanes on the Roof. Conceived
and directed by Glass, it was a multimedia project in which Hwang's text
served as a narrative framework for Glass's music and Sirlin's set and
projection images. The play concerns a character who may have been kidnapped
by visiting aliens. "She longs to discuss her experience, but knows her
tale will be dismissed," wrote Allan Kozinn in a New York Times
review. "To appear sane, she has to deny it happened; but she fears that
repressing this momentous experience will drive her crazy." The
character's confusion and distress are illumined by ever-changing images of
cities, grids, and stars projected on the set by Sirlin, whose work, according
to Washington Post contributor Pamela Sommers, "steals the
show." Sommers criticized Hwang's narrative as uneven, summarizing the
evening as "intermittently compelling and disappointing ... intriguing if
perplexing." Kozinn, however, praised Hwang for his "rich, gripping
monologue."
"Hwang is a very clever and gifted playwright," acknowledged Jack
Kroll in Newsweek. Successful and praised at twenty-three, winner of a
Tony at thirty, he has brought a striking imagination to bear on issues and
concerns that span the globe and has won a wide audience. "The main
weakness of his writing," assessed Henry in Time, "is that
its purpose often seems more political than literary, more attuned to social
issues than to the private struggles of the human heart. The final scene of M.
Butterfly, when the agony of one soul finally takes precedence over
broad-ranging commentary, is among the most forceful in the history of the
American theater.... If Hwang can again fuse politics and humanity, he has the
potential to become the first important dramatist of American public life
since Arthur Miller, and maybe the best of them all."
Interview
[Jean W. Ross interviewed David Henry Hwang by telephone on June 28, 1989, at
his home in New York City.]
CA: You went off to Stanford University thinking you'd become a lawyer,
according to one account I read, but ended up instead hooked on playwriting.
What was the great attraction of theater for you at that point?
HWANG: First of all, it wasn't so much a matter of my going off to
Stanford intending to become a lawyer. I think law is often the default-
option for kids who are fairly bright and verbal but don't exactly know what
they want to do. I think it was more a question of going to Stanford to figure
out what I wanted to do, and I thought, if nothing else, I could always go to
law school. When I started out in college I went to a few plays, mostly at the
American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. I've never been able to give a
very adequate answer to why I became attracted to the theater. I think it was
mostly because I saw this event taking place before me and I thought, I can
probably do that. Shortly afterwards I began to become attracted to the notion
of creating a world which then physically existed in front of me; I think that
explains my attraction at that point to theater over, say, film. It's
something about the creation of that live world that must have been the
initial attraction.
CA: You told Jeremy Gerard for the New York Times Magazine that
when you were growing up, you thought being Chinese was "a minor detail,
like having red hair." How did you begin to feel otherwise and to start
exploring your heritage?
HWANG: A lot of that happened in college. I was in college in the
mid-to late 1970s, and whereas most people seem to associate collegiate life
in the seventies with [actor] John Travolta, there was at that time a third-
world consciousness, a third-world power movement, in the universities,
particularly among Hispanics and Asians. The blacks really started it in the
late sixties and early seventies, and it took a while to trickle down into the
other third-world communities. Asians probably picked it up last; we got
interested in the late seventies, when many of the other ethnic communities
had become less politicized. I think my political consciousness, such as it
is, evolved out of that third-world, Marxist setting at the university. While
I was never a very ardent Marxist, I studied the ideas and I was interested in
the degree to which we all may have been affected by certain prejudices in the
society without having realized it, and to what degree we had incorporated
that into our persons by the time we'd reached our early twenties.
The other thing that I think fascinated me about exploring my Chineseness
at that time was consistent with my interest in playwriting. I had become very
interested in Sam Shepard, particularly in the way in which Shepard likes to
create a sort of American mythology. In his case it's the cowboy mythology,
but nonetheless it's something that is larger than simply our present-day,
fast-food existence. In my context, creating a mythology, creating a past for
myself, involved going into Chinese history and Chinese- American history. I
think the combination of wanting to delve into those things for artistic
reasons and being exposed to an active third-world- consciousness movement was
what started to get me interested in my roots when I was in college.
CA: I noticed that you dedicated Family Devotions in part
to Sam Shepard.
HWANG: Yes. That's not only because of his literary inspiration, but
also because I started writing Family Devotions when I was at a
playwriting seminar in 1980 which was led by Shepard. So I felt that
dedication was doubly appropriate. Also, the original draft of Family
Relations attempted to copy the structure of Buried Child [a
Shepard play]. It since has evolved into something else, but that was one of
the initial impetuses.
CA: Joseph Papp has been instrumental in producing your work since your
first play, F.O.B., was done at New York's Public Theater in
1980 and marked the beginning of your recognition as a playwright. Would you
like to comment on your work with Mr. Papp?
HWANG: It's important to realize that when F.O.B. was
produced at the Public, I was twenty-three. At that point Joe said that he
would produce anything I wrote, and subsequently he was quite good to his word
and produced my next four plays. To have that sort of context and that
confidence from a producer so that one is not working in a vacuum is a
wonderful luxury for a developing writer. I think one of the most frightening
things--and I've seen this in some of my friends who are writers--is going
through that period when you feel you're writing just for yourself, that
there's no other audience. This is particularly true for playwrights and for
screenwriters, whose work doesn't really come to fruition until it enters a
collaborative situation. It's very stifling to feel that one is working in a
vacuum. Always having had the resources of the Public, knowing that I would
have access to actors and a stage and directors since a very early age and a
very early point in my career, I think really helped me develop as a
playwright. People who don't have that luxury have to struggle it out for
themselves, whereas I had a wonderful support system.
CA: It must be very difficult for beginning playwrights to resist trying
to do something more commercial than what might be in their hearts to write.
HWANG: I think there is that temptation. People often ask me now if
I feel a lot of pressure, since the success of M. Butterfly, to do
something that's commercially equivalent. I tend not to want to take it that
way, but the pressure to write what's commercial certainly exists at many
different periods in one's career. Early in one's career, when one is not
recognized, the pressure manifests itself more as a survival need, and to that
extent I think is more acute and more desperate than it may appear at later
stages.
CA: You often use elements of traditional Chinese theater in your plays.
How were you able to see and study Chinese theater?
HWANG: I learned most of that on the job, so to speak. I was
fortunate enough to hook up with John Lone very early in my career. Mako, who
directed F.O.B. at the Public, cast John in the role of Steve. When I
first wrote F.O.B., I didn't necessarily have the idea that the battle
sequences at the end would be done in stylized Chinese opera fashion. It was
something that everybody else who read the script saw fairly clearly, but I
didn't know. When I went to the O'Neill with it, Bob Ackerman, who directed it
there, already had the idea of weaving in Chinese opera, and of course Mako
followed that through. By casting John, an actor who was trained in the
traditions of Chinese opera in Hong Kong before coming to the United States
and studying Western acting, we were able to have a great deal of resource.
Consequently, when I wrote The Dance and the Railroad next, I wrote it
very consciously as a play that would be a fusion of Eastern and Western
theater. I knew that I would have John as a resource to teach me more about
Chinese opera. Since then I haven't always used Chinese opera techniques, but
I do again in M. Butterfly, and it's really just a matter of finding a
collaborator who knows the form. At this point I know a little bit about it
simply because I've been around it a fair amount in my own plays. But it's
such an intricate form, it has so many rules of its own, that it takes a
lifetime of study to understand, so I certainly can't do it by myself.
CA: In The Dance and the Railroad you gave your characters
the names of John Lone and Tzi Ma, who played the parts. Did the actors have
some hand in the way their parts were actually shaped?
HWANG: One of the great things about working on The Dance and the
Railroad was that it was very much a collaborative process. While I
actually wrote all the words, nonetheless I think that John and Tzi and I
created a community way of working. They had a lot of input into their
characters and in expressing things that they felt. I had a lot of input into
the direction and Tzi had a lot of input into the choreography. I think that's
one of the reasons Dance was successful; the production and the text
were quite seamlessly linked simply because we had been working so
collaboratively. That's one of the reasons that I decided to name the
characters after John and Tzi. But also, since I wrote it specifically for
them and I often tend to be lazy with names, I just gave them John's and
Tzi's.
CA: Gerald Weales, writing for Contemporary Dramatists, noted
your use of the modes of television situation comedies, particularly in Family
Devotions. Do you think television and movies have been big influences
in your work?
HWANG: I think certainly movies have been a big influence.
Television I watched growing up as much as anybody else, and I think I'm
influenced by it. But I haven't actually watched that much of it since I went
to college, so as an adult I haven't been that much affected by it. While I
love theater and want to continue working in theater, film has always been an
additional love; I'd like to work more in it and have started to do that. I
think it's fair to say that a lot of my work has been influenced by these
other media. They're the media of our day.
CA: How do you feel writing for film and television compares to writing
for the stage?
HWANG: There's the obvious traditional complaint about the writer
having less power in a film, and I've found that to be the case. But I also
feel that one kind of writing helps the other. The fact that one has a certain
amount of prestige as a playwright means that he's treated somewhat better in
the movies than he would be as a journeyman screenwriter. But in order to get
the more complete ability to project a vision in film that I have in the
theater, I think I have to direct. I have a project in the works right now for
a movie that I'm supposed to direct next year, and I'm looking forward to
that. I think it will enable me to have a full range of creative expression.
People always talk about politics in Hollywood, but I don't think Hollywood
is any more corrupt politically than the nonprofit theater. I think one has to
go through just as many machinations and power struggles in the not-for-profit
theater as one does working for Disney or Columbia or any of the studios. I
think it's a myth to believe that theater is somehow more pure politically
because it is more inherently artistic. People are people, and you fight the
same sort of battles on whatever level you're dealing.
CA: You seem to have brought a lot of musical background to your work as
a playwright. Did you study music formally?
HWANG: I studied classical violin from the age of seven to the age
of seventeen. I quit for a year, and when I was in college I picked up the
instrument again and began improvising. I played jazz for seven or eight years
after that--after I came to New York, it kind of pooped out. I do a bit of it
still: I play on some of Lucia Hwong's albums and occasionally on other
friends' albums. But by and large I don't do it that much anymore.
CA: You've told earlier interviewers how the amazing true story of a
French diplomat and his Chinese lover, a Beijing Opera star who turned out to
be a man, called to your mind the Puccini opera Madama Butterfly and
became your award-winning play M. Butterfly. Earlier you had
felt some concern about "riding the hyphen," as Jeremy Gerard titled
his article--becoming stereotyped as a Chinese-American writer. Has M.
Butterfly helped you overcome that worry to some extent?
HWANG: Oddly enough, it has. I say "oddly" because much of
the play does concern a Chinese topic, but I've found that these labels are
very one-dimensional. I guess one would expect this in some sense, but one
would also hope that it was not quite so simplistic. They're predicated on
things that are very simply torn down. In the case of M. Butterfly, the
fact that I've proved I can write a major role for a Caucasian actor means
that all of a sudden I'm not just an Asian writer. I can tell that partly by
how I'm received by the press and by interviewers, but a more telling,
ruthless sign is the types of things I'm offered in movies to write. Before,
Hollywood would offer me a lot of movies that were based on different Asian
countries. I still get those, of course, but now I also get a much wider range
of subjects, many of which don't have anything to do with Asia.
I first became aware of the simplistic nature of this stereotyping when I
did the two Japanese plays The Sound of a Voice and The House of
Sleeping Beauties. I thought this work was a departure because these were
the first plays I'd written that didn't deal with being Chinese- American,
with race and assimilation; I felt that they were really tragic love stories.
Yet they were not perceived as being a departure, because they had Asian
actors. So I realized that the stereotyping is based on the color of the
actors. Similarly, even though M. Butterfly is about East-West
relations, at least in part, the fact that now I've written major roles for
Caucasians, that there are a lot of white people running around the stage,
seems to indicate that I'm no longer just an Asian writer. One wants to hope
that these categories are a bit more complicated than that, but I don't think
they are.
CA: I wonder if there will come a time when the expression "ethnic
theater" won't have any meaning.
HWANG: I'm hopeful that there will be a time at some point, but I
think it's going to be fifty years or so down the road. The whole idea of
being ethnic only applies when it's clear what the dominant culture is. Once
it becomes less clear and the culture is acknowledged to be more
multicultural, then the idea of what's ethnic becomes irrelevant. I think even
today we're starting to see that. The mono-ethnic theaters--that is, the Asian
theaters, the black theaters, the Hispanic theaters--are really useful; they
serve a purpose. But I think, if we do our jobs correctly, we will phase out
our own need for existence and the future of theaters will be in multicultural
theaters, theaters that do a black play and a Jewish play and a classic and
whatever. That sort of thing is already starting to happen. In San Francisco,
for example, there's now a coalition being built between the Oakland Ensemble
Theater, which is a black theater; Teatro Campesino, which is Hispanic; and
the Asian-American Theater Company. They will pool their resources and do a
season. I think that sort of thing is great.
There are so many people now who can't be labeled. I know a couple in which
the man is Japanese and Jewish and the woman is Haitian and Filipino. They
have a child, and sociologists have told them that a child of that stock
probably hasn't existed before. When someone like that becomes a writer, what
do we call him? Do we say he's an Asian writer, or what? As those distinctions
become increasingly muddled, the whole notion of what is ethnic as opposed to
what is mainstream is going to become more and more difficult to define.
CA: After Stanford you took some courses at the Yale School of Drama but
didn't stay there for a degree. How did you find the academic work helpful?
HWANG: One of the reasons I wanted to go to Yale was that I felt I
didn't actually have a good grounding in theater history.
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