He was born in 1957 in Los Angeles, California, to Henry Yuan Hwang, the founder of Far East National Bank,[1] and Dorothy Hwang, a piano teacher. The oldest of three children, he has two younger sisters. He received a bachelor's degree in English from Stanford University in 1979 and attended the Yale School of Drama between 1980 and 1981, taking literature classes.[2] He left once workshopping of new plays began, since he already had a play being produced in New York. His first play was produced at the Okada House dormitory (named Junipero House at the time) at Stanford University after he briefly studied playwriting with Sam Shepard and María Irene Fornés.[3] In summer 1978, he studied playwriting with Sam Shepard and attended Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, both of which led him to write his first plays such as FOB.[4]
Career
Playwright David Henry Hwang teaching a writing class in San Francisco's Fort Mason in 1979
Trilogy of Chinese America
Hwang's early plays concerned the role of the Chinese American and Asian American in the contemporary world. His first play, FOB,[5] explores the contrasts and conflicts between established Asian Americans and "Fresh Off the Boat" new immigrants. The play was developed by the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center and premiered in 1980 Off-Broadway at the Joseph Papp Public Theater. In 1981 it won an Obie Award for Best New American Play.[6] Papp produced four more of Hwang's plays, including two in 1981: The Dance and the Railroad, which tells the story of a former Chinese opera star working as a coolie laborer in the 19th-century American West,[7] and Family Devotions,[8] a darkly comic take on the effects of Western religion on a Chinese-American family. This was nominated for the Drama Desk Award. Those three plays added up to what the author described as a "Trilogy of Chinese America."[9]
Branching out / national success
After this, Papp also produced the show Sound and Beauty, the omnibus title to two Hwang one-act plays set in Japan. At this time, Hwang started to work on projects for the small screen. A television movie, Blind Alleys, written by Hwang and Frederic Kimball and starring Pat Morita and Cloris Leachman, was produced in 1985 and followed a television version of The Dance and the Railroad.[7]
Hwang's best-known play was M. Butterfly, which premiered on Broadway in 1988. The play is a deconstruction of Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly,[11] alluding to news reports of the 20th-century relationship between French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu, a male Chinese opera singer. Shi purportedly convinced Boursicot that he was a woman throughout their twenty-year relationship.[12] The play won numerous awards for Best Play: a Tony Award (which Hwang was the first Asian American to win), the Drama Desk Award, the John Gassner Award, and the Outer Critics Circle Award. It was the first of three of his works to become a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Work post-Butterfly
The success of M. Butterfly prompted Hwang's interests in many other different directions, including work for opera, film, and the musical theatre. Hwang became a frequent collaborator as a librettist with the world-renowned composer Philip Glass.[13]
Throughout the 1990s, Hwang continued to write for the stage, including short plays for the famed Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. His full-length Golden Child, received its world premiere at South Coast Repertory in 1996. Golden Child was later produced in New York City. It won a 1997 Obie Award for playwriting for Hwang's 1996 off-Broadway production. In 1998 it was produced on Broadway, and was nominated that year for a Tony Award for Best Play.[17]
Return to Broadway
In the new millennium, Hwang had two Broadway successes back-to-back. He was asked by director Robert Falls to help co-write the book for the musical Aida (based upon the opera by Giuseppe Verdi). In an earlier version, it had failed in regional theatre tryouts. Hwang and Falls re-wrote a significant portion of the book (by Linda Woolverton). Aida (with music and lyrics by Elton John and Tim Rice) opened in 2000 and proved highly profitable.[18]
His next project was a radical revision of Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, II, and Joseph Fields' musical Flower Drum Song.[19] Although successful when introduced in the 1950s and early 1960s, it had become dated. The Civil Rights Movement and other cultural changes had disrupted continuing stereotypical portrayals of Asian American communities[citation needed]. Though it had never been a full critical success, the work inspired another generation of Asian Americans to re-imagine this musical. It was adapted from the novel The Flower Drum Song by C. Y. Lee, and tells the culture clash encountered by a Chinese family living in San Francisco.[20]
The Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization allowed Hwang to significantly rework the plot, while retaining character names and songs. His 2002 version —both an homage to the original and a modern re-thinking— won him his third Tony nomination.[21] Though Flower Drum Song is often called the first musical with an all-Asian cast, the original production had cast many non-Asians in leading roles, including Caucasians and an African-American (Juanita Hall). But the 2002 revival was produced with an all-Asian cast of actor-singers, and it toured nationally.[20]
Back to The Public
David Henry Hwang at the Public Theater in New York City in 2008
Hwang's 2007 play Yellow Face relates to his play Face Value, which closed in previews on Broadway in the early 1990s. He wrote it in response to a controversy about the casting of Jonathan Pryce in an Eurasian role in Miss Saigon. Face Value, which included music and lyrics for a musical-within-a-play by Hwang, lost millions of dollars. It was a stumbling block in the careers of Hwang and producer Stuart Ostrow.[22]
In Yellow Face, Hwang wrote a semi-autobiographical play, featuring him as the main character in a media farce about mistaken racial identity. This had been also an important element in Face Value.[22]
Yellow Face premiered in Los Angeles in 2007 at the Mark Taper Forum as a co-production with East West Players. It moved Off-Broadway to the Joseph Papp Public Theater, an important venue for Hwang's earlier work. It enjoyed an extended run at the Papp, and won Hwang his third Obie Award for Playwriting. The play was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.[23]
Hwang also wrote a new short play, The Great Helmsman for the Papp's night of plays: Ten.[24]
Opera
Hwang has continued to work steadily in the world of opera and musical theatre, and has written for children's theatre as well. Hwang co-wrote the English-language libretto for an operatic adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland with music (and part of the libretto) by the Korean composer Unsuk Chin. It received its world premiere at the Bavarian State Opera in 2007 and was released on DVD in 2008.[25]
After its major success at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, Hwang's play, Chinglish, quickly made its way to Broadway in October 2011. It won the Joseph Jefferson Award. Chinglish was largely inspired by Hwang's frequent visits to China and his observations of interactions between Chinese and American people. Ticket sales of Chinglish were conservative.[29]
Hwang's short play A Very DNA Reunion was written for the evening of plays The DNA Trail, which was conceived by Jamil Khoury and premiered at the historic Chicago Temple Building.[30]
In 2014 two new Hwang plays were premiered. The first, Kung Fu, about the life of Bruce Lee, premiered as part of his residency at the Signature TheatreOff-Broadway. The play opened February 24, 2014 in a production directed by Leigh Silverman, and featuring Cole Horibe, who had gained fame in the TV series, So You Think You Can Dance.[33] The second was Cain and Abel, one of many plays included in The Mysteries, a re-telling of Bible stories. Conceived by Ed Sylvanus Iskander, The Mysteries also featured the work of playwrights Craig Lucas, Dael Orlandersmith, Jose Rivera, and Jeff Whitty.[34]
In 2014, Hwang joined the Playwriting Faculty of the Columbia University School of the Arts Theatre Program. He was appointed the director of the Playwriting Concentration and will serve as an Associate Professor of Theatre in Playwriting. Hilton Als of the New Yorker has described him as "the most successful Chinese American playwright this country has produced."[35]
In 2016, Hwang became a writer and consulting producer of the Golden Globe-winning television series The Affair[36] and in 1993 wrote a song "Solo" in association with Prince.[37]
In the fall of 2016, the San Francisco Opera premiered Dream of the Red Chamber, an opera by Hwang and Bright Sheng, based on the eighteenth-century Chinese novel of the same name.[38] In the summer of 2016, Hwang became the chair of the board of the American Theatre Wing.[39]
In the Spring of 2018, Hwang's Soft Power premiered at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, California. The music and additional lyrics are by Jeanine Tesori. Its cast is largely Asian.[40] It transferred to Off-Broadway at the Public Theater in September 2019 (previews).[41] In May 2020, it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making Hwang the first person to be a three-time finalist without winning.
Mr. Hwang sits on the boards of the Dramatists Guild, Young Playwrights Inc., and the Museum Of Chinese in the Americas (MOCA). He conducts interviews on arts-related topics for the national PBS cable television show Asian America. From 1994 to 2001, he served by appointment of President Bill Clinton on the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.[50]
Hwang served on the board of directors for Far East National Bank founded by his father Henry Yuan Hwang. In 1999, American regulators investigated some of the bank's transactions with Chinese banks as possible funding for illegal campaign contributions, Chinese espionage, and other possibilities, but the results were inconclusive.[59] In 1989, Hwang's father hired then-Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley as a consultant who received a loan from the bank, helping it secure $2 million from city funds.[60] When this became a major scandal in the city, however, Bradley returned his $18,000 in payments, and resigned from the consulting work.[61] Hwang addresses his father's controversies in his semi-autobiographical 2007 play Yellow Face.
Personal life
Hwang was married to Ophelia Chong from 1985 until their divorce in 1989.[62][63] In 1993, he married actress Kathryn Layng. They have two children together.[64][65]
In November 2015, Hwang was the victim of a stabbing near his home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. The assailant stabbed Hwang in the neck, severing his vertebral artery, before running from the scene. Hwang was seriously injured and underwent surgery before being discharged from the hospital. The attack appeared to be random, as nothing was taken; the assailant was never found. Hwang wrote about the experience in The New York Times.[66][67] The stabbing also inspired a semi-autobiographical portion of Soft Power, in which the lead character, also named David Henry Hwang, is the victim of a random stabbing.
Broken Promises, New York: Avon, 1983. (out-of-print; includes FOB, The Dance and the Railroad, Family Devotions, and The House of Sleeping Beauties)
M. Butterfly, New York: Plume, 1988. (Acting edition published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.; audio version available from L. A. Theatre Works; film version available from Warner Bros.)
1,000 Airplanes on the Roof, Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1989. (Original Music Recording available from Virgin Records)
Between Worlds: Contemporary Asian-American Plays, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1990. (includes Hwang's As the Crow Flies and The Sound of a Voice)
FOB and Other Plays, New York: New American Library, 1990. (out-of-print; includes FOB, The Dance and the Railroad, The House of Sleeping Beauties, The Sound of a Voice, Rich Relations and 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof)
On a Bed of Rice: An Asian American Erotic Feast, New York: Anchor Books, 1995. (includes Hwang and Prince's Come)
Golden Child, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1998. (Acting edition published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.)
Trying to Find Chinatown: The Selected Plays, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1999. (includes FOB, The Dance and the Railroad, Family Devotions, The Sound of a Voice, The House of Sleeping Beauties, Bondage, The Voyage, and Trying to Find Chinatown)
Humana Festival 1999: The Complete Plays, New Hampshire: Smith and Kraus, 1999. (include Hwang's Merchandising)
Rich Relations, New York: Playscripts, Inc., 2002.
Flower Drum Song, music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, book by David Henry Hwang; based upon the libretto by Oscar Hammerstein, II and Joseph Fields and the novel The Flower Drum Song by C. Y. Lee; New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2003. (Broadway Cast Recording available from DRG)
2004: The Best Ten-Minute Plays for Two Actors, New Hampshire: Smith and Kraus, 2003. (includes Hwang's Jade Flowerpots and Bound Feet)
Peer Gynt (with Stephan Muller), based upon the play by Henrik Ibsen; New York: Playscripts, Inc., 2006.
Tibet Through the Red Box, based upon the book by Peter Sis; New York: Playscripts, Inc., 2006.
2007: The Best Ten-Minute Plays for Three or More Actors, New Hampshire: Smith and Kraus, 2008. (includes Hwang's The Great Helmsman)
Yellow Face; Theatre Communications Group, 2009. (Acting edition published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.)
Chinglish; Theatre Communications Group, 2012. (Acting edition published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
