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Drama
David Henry Hwang
David Henry Hwang was born in Los Angeles in 1957 to immigrant parents who had originally
met at the University of Southern California, where both were students. Hwang's
father emigrated from Shanghai and eventually became a banker; his mother,
who grew up in a Chinese neighborhood in the Philippines, is a piano teacher.
In a 1994 interview, Hwang remarks that after his parents married, they were
unable to move into a suburb of Los Angeles in which they were interested
because no one there would sell a house to Chinese people. Instead, Hwang
grew up in another, more racially mixed suburb, San Gabriel, and eventually
attended Stanford University, where he graduated with a degree in English.
He wrote his first play FOB [Fresh off the Boat] there in 1978. It
was produced by the Stanford Asian American Theatre Project the following
year, and two years later it won an Obie Award as Best New Play of the Year
while Hwang was refining his talents at the Yale School of Drama.
As Hwang would later describe
the play, the "roots" of FOB are "thoroughly American," one aspect
of which is the struggle for immigrant peoples to assimilate into American
society—which means, in effect, becoming white and erasing all traces of their
ethnic heritage. "The difficulty," Hwang writes, is "that this is not possible,"
and when one finally realizes this, a certain amount of "self-loathing" is
an inevitable result. Several of Hwang's plays continue this study of the
often difficult assimilation of Asians into American culture, his 1981 play
Family Devotions, for example.
Hwang's interests in such other
topics as sexuality, racism, and imperialism coalesce in his most important
work to date, M. Butterfly (1988), which won the Tony Award for Best
Play of the Year. Inspired by a newspaper article about a French diplomat
maintaining a long-term relationship with a person whom he thought to be a
woman, but who was actually both a spy and a man, M. Butterfly melds
this intriguing story with Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly to create
one of contemporary America's most influential dramas. In particular, Hwang
explores Western constructions of the "Oriental" as inherently feminine, submissive,
and—finally—inferior, demonstrating how these very fantasies of cultural superiority
allowed the French diplomat René Gallimard to be duped by a talented Chinese
agent.
Throughout the 1990s, Hwang's
career has developed in a number of different directions: writing successful
screenplays, lecturing at such institutions as MIT, collaborating with composers
on contemporary operas, and continuing his playwriting. His one-act play
Bondage (1992) was selected as one of twenty one-act plays to be included
in a volume celebrating twenty years of the Humana Festival of New American
Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Hwang continues to be a prominent
force in the contemporary American theatre and a distinct voice in discussions
of an increasingly multicultural America.
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Selected Bibliography of Hwang's Work
Plays
F.O.B. (produced, 1979)
The Dance and the Railroad (1981)
Family Devotions (1981)
The House of Sleeping Beauties (1983)
The Sound of a Voice (1983)
Rich Relations (1986)
M. Butterfly (1988)
1,000 Airplanes on the Roof: A Science Fiction Music Drama (Book, 1989; music by Philip Glass)
Bondage (1992)
Face Value (1993)
Golden Child (1998)
Trying to Find Chinatown 1999)
The Voyage
Screenplays
M. Butterfly (1993)
Golden Gate (1993)
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Further Reading About Hwang's Work
Cody, Gabrielle. "David Hwang's M. Butterfly: Perpetuating the Misogynist Myth." Theater 20 (1989): 24-27.
DiGaetani, John Louis. "M. Butterfly: An Interview with David Henry Hwang." TDR 33 (1989); 141-53.
Hwang, David Henry. Broken Promises. New York: Avon Books, 1983.
________________. FOB and Other Plays. New York: New American Library, 1990.
_______________. Trying to Find Chinatown: The Selected Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2000.
Jiji, Vera. "The Plays of David Hwang: The Gaze of the Medusa." Staging the Rage: The Web of Misogyny in Modern Drama. Eds, Katherine H. Burkman and Judith Roof. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1998. 218-29.
Moy, James S. Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1993.
Shimakawa, Karen. ".Who's to Say?' Or, Making Space for Gender and Ethnicity in M. Butterfly." Theatre Journal 45 (1993): 349-61.
Skloot, Robert. "Breaking the Butterfly: The Politics of David Henry Hwang." Modern Drama 33 (1990): 59-66.
White, Paula Jayne. "What Passes for a Woman in Modern China." In Burkman and Roof. 196-217.
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