This site includes a brief interview from the Spring 1994 issue of Mosaic, the University of Pennsylvania's Asian American literary magazine.

David Henry Hwang guest lecture at MIT
http://www.mit.edu:8001/afs/athena/user/i/r/irie/www/hdhwang.txt

A lengthy lecture given at MIT, April 15, 1994, is offered at this site.

BIOGRAPHY
David Henry Hwang (b. 1957). Born in Los Angeles to immigrants, his father a banker and his mother a professor of piano, Hwang graduated from Stanford University in 1979. But by 1978 he had already written his first play, FOB (Fresh Off the Boat), which won the 1981 Obie Award as the best new play of the season when Joseph Papp brought it to off-Broadway in New York. Hwang attended the famous Yale School of Drama during 1980 and 1981.

Two more promising plays, The Dance and the Railroad and Family Devotions, based on the problems of immigrants trying, sometimes, to assimilate and sometimes to avoid assimilation in a new culture, appeared in 1981. His 1985 marriage to Ophelia Y. M. Chong, an artist, ended in divorce. Hwang continued to write and direct during the 1980s, moving from the relatively narrow early material to "wider concerns of race, gender, and culture." His 1988 Broadway hit, M. Butterfly, won the Tony Award for best play, and established him as a major modern American playwright.

A critic writing in Time argued that "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."

His recent work includes 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof: A Science Fiction Music Drama (1989), a collaboration with Philip Glass and Jerome Sirlin.