| Home |
 |
Drama |
|
David Henry Hwang |
|
 |  |  |  |
The work of playwright David Henry Hwang--along with its critical reception--illustrates the dilemma often faced by the ethnic writer in America. After an assimilationalist youth as the child of immigrant parents, he discovered his roots during his college years, and made exploration of his heritage the subject of the works that originally brought him notice, to arrive at a position in which pursuing other subjects brings the risk of critical disapproval, while continuing to treat them brings the even greater risk of being marginalized. But Hwang has proven himself to be a resourceful and surprising writer in past works, and will doubtless continue to do so in the future.
David Henry Hwang was born on August 11, 1957, in Los Angeles, California, the first of his parents' three children and their only son. His father, Henry Yuan Hwang, left his native Shanghai, China, in the late 1940s, around the time of the Communist takeover, and came to California; he studied business at the University of Southern California, where he met his future wife, and later became a banker. The playwright's mother, Dorothy (Huang) Hwang, was born in China and raised in the Philippines. She studied music at USC and pursued a career as a piano teacher at the Coburn School of the Arts. David Henry Hwang has said that when he was young he regarded his Chinese ancestry as "a minor detail, like having red hair," but subsequently added that "the combination of wanting to delve into those things [Chinese and Chinese-American history] 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." He graduated from Stanford University in 1979 with a bachelor of arts degree in English. For a short time thereafter, he taught high school in Menlo Park, California, and then enrolled in the Yale School of Drama. He married Ophelia Chong, an artist, on September 25, 1985. Four years later, the marriage was dissolved. He later married Kathryn Layng, an actress. They have a son named Noah.
His play F.O.B. was first produced at Stanford while Hwang was an undergraduate. His father had previously declined to read the script, because of his difficulty in reading English and his feeling that writing plays was not a serious occupation. But when he was saw the production, he was moved to tears, and decided to support his son's career goals. F.O.B. was produced at the National Playwrights Conference in 1979, and then by Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival's Public Theater in 1980. In its New York production, it received an Obie (Off-Broadway) award as the best new play of the season. Other awards, grants, and fellowships have followed, including a Tony Award for the Best Play of 1988 and a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1989, both for M. Butterfly, which remains his greatest success to date.
Hwang has worked as a theater director, and has also written screenplays for a number of films, including M. Butterfly (1993, with Jeremy Irons and John Lone) and Golden Gate (1994, with Matt Dillon and Joan Chen). He also made a preliminary adaptation of Heinrich Harrer's Seven Years in Tibet, although he was not the scriptwriter of record when the film, starring Brad Pitt, was released in 1997.
The two principal male characters of F.O.B. symbolize the opposing poles of personal response to the immigrant experience: Steve, the F.O.B. of the title (which here stands for "fresh off the boat"), is scorned by Dale, a thoroughly assimilated A.B.C. (American-born Chinese) who turns his back on his heritage and all that it represents. Between them stands Grace, Dale's cousin, who is sympathetic to each man's situation. Critics, including Frank Rich of The New York Times, responded positively to the play's humor, energy, and willingness to take artistic risks in an attempt to enliven familiar material, taking particular note of its use of Chinese mythological figures and traditional theater techniques.
Hwang continued to explore Chinese immigrant themes in The Dance and the Railroad and Family Devotions, both of which were produced in New York in 1981. The Dance and the Railroad portrays, in part through poetic dialogue and stylized theatrical technique, the relationship between two railroad workers, one of whom has been in America for several years, the other newly arrived from China. Family Devotions, more realistic and even farcical, contrasts an Americanized Chinese family who are evangelical Christians with an atheist uncle visiting from China. The Dance and the Railroad was also broadcast on the Arts & Entertainment network in 1982.
Sound and Beauty, produced in New York in 1983, is Hwang's first work not to focus upon the lives of Chinese-Americans. It is comprised of two one-act plays, both stylized in technique and both set in Japan. "The House of Sleeping Beauties" is derived from the novella of that name by the Nobel Prize-winning Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata, and reworks the material to incorporate Kawabata as a participant in his own narrative. "The Sound of a Voice" involves a samurai warrior who intends to kill a female hermit whom he regards as a threatening witch, but finds his attitude toward her changing as he comes to know her. Frank Rich, continuing to follow Hwang's development closely, found this latter play somewhat disappointing, constricted by its overt symbolism, but nonetheless commended Hwang for continuing to experiment and grow as an artist.
Rich Relations, produced in 1986, was a setback for Hwang, receiving mostly negative notices. It was the first of his plays to contain an all-Caucasian cast, but it was in fact not its newness but its familiarity--dealing as it did with materialism, families in conflict, and evangelical Christianity--that displeased the critics. Hwang himself acknowledged that "It's about my family--except that they're not Asians." He rebounded two years later with M. Butterfly, a play based on the actual experience of a French diplomat who lived with a Chinese lover for many years without ever realizing that that lover was not only a spy, but also a man. As the title makes clear, it was Hwang's intention to evoke Giacomo Puccini's 1904 opera Madama Butterfly, in which Lt. Pinkerton of the American navy marries and then abandons a Japanese woman, who subsequently commits suicide. Hwang's original title for the play was Monsieur Butterfly, but his wife persuaded him to emphasize the ambiguities of the situation in both title and text.
Hwang proceeded somewhat tentatively in the wake of the enormous success of M. Butterfly, fearing that whatever he did next would be a disappointment. A one-act play called Bondage premiered in 1992, followed by Face Value, a full-length work, the following year. The New York production of this play, which Hwang concedes was hastily and insufficiently revised, closed during previews. His next play was Golden Child, based on the memories of his ninety-year-old maternal grandmother. It was produced at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York in 1996, to a mixed, generally unfavorable reception. Hwang rewrote the play, and it opened on Broadway in April 1998. Many of the notices were strongly favorable.
Peter Marks of The New York Times, although he found the play less than satisfying theatrically, took note of the complexities of Hwang's thematic intentions: "But contrary to so many depictions of the encroachments of the West on Asia, 'Golden Child' does not present Westernization as a moral contamination, a de-purification... Mr. Hwang suggests that the exchange of ideas creates opportunities for personal growth, for new ways of thinking..."
Hwang himself, in an interview in the April 1998 issue of American Theater, endorses a similar view of his progress and present stage of development as a playwright: "Family Devotions, which I wrote at 23, is a very angry indictment of the Christian fundamentalist mindset. The family in that play has been corrupted by Christianity and has lost its true beliefs. In Rich Relations, the younger character also has skeletons in his closet, so everybody's rotten. Golden Child, for better or worse, has a much more forgiving point of view, and I hope it's an anti-fundamentalist play in the largest sense--that is, against any belief system that casts things in black or white."
This evolution in his work, and his refusal to stereotype or to find convenient solutions on either side of the equation, are emblematic of the independence with which Hwang approaches his subject matter. His unwillingness to be limited by others' expectations of him and his desire to find new directions in his work are also illustrated by his current project, a modern adaptation, with Stephan Müller, of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt.
| Legal and Privacy Terms |  |