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Biography (b. 1957)
Born in Los Angeles, David Henry Hwang is the son of immigrant Chinese American parents; his father worked as a banker, and his mother was a professor of piano. Educated at Stanford University, from which he earned his B.A. in English in 1979, he became interested in theater after attending plays at the American Conservatory in San Francisco. His marginal interest in a law career quickly gave way to his involvement in the engaging world of live theater. By his senior year, he had written and produced his first play, FOB (an acronym for "fresh off the boat"), which marked the beginning of a meteoric rise as a playwright. After a brief stint as a writing teacher at a Menlo Park high school, Hwang attended the Yale University School of Drama from 1980 to 1981. Although he didn’t stay to complete a degree, he studied theater history before leaving for New York City, where he thought the professional theater would provide a richer education than the student workshops at Yale. In New York Hwang’s work received a warm reception. In 1980 an off-Broadway production of FOB won an Obie Award for the best new play of the season. The play incorporates many of Hwang’s characteristic concerns as a playwright. Growing up in California as a Chinese American made him politically conscious during his college years in the late 1970s; this interest in his Chinese roots is evident in the central conflicts of FOB, which focuses on a Chinese immigrant’s relationship with two Chinese American students he meets in Los Angeles. The immigrant quickly learns that he is expected to abandon much of his Chinese identity if he is to fit into mainstream American culture. The issues that arise between East and West are played out with comic effect in a Western theater but enriched and complicated by Hwang’s innovative use of a Chinese theatrical tradition that portrays major characters as figures from Chinese mythology. Chinese American life is also the focus of The Dance and the Railroad and Family Devotions, both produced off-Broadway in 1981. The Dance and the Railroad, set in the nineteenth century, focuses on two immigrant Chinese men working on the transcontinental railroad and attempting to sort out their pasts while confronting new identities and uncertain futures in America. Hwang mirrors the characters’ conflicts in the play’s form by creating a mixture of Eastern and Western theater and incorporating the nonrealistic modes of Chinese opera. Family Devotions examines an established affluent Chinese American family in the twentieth century through the lens of a television sitcom. The problems faced by immigrants living hyphenated lives are comically played out through the interaction of a visiting Communist uncle from China and his great-nephew, who struggles to find an authentic identity amid his family’s materialism and Christianity. Hwang’s early plays are populated with Chinese Americans attempting to find the center of their own lives as they seesaw between the conventions, traditions, and values of East and West.
Hwang’s next two dramas, produced in 1983, consist of two one-act plays set in Japan. Together they are titled Sound and Beauty, but each has its own title— The House of Sleeping Beauties and The Sound of a Voice. In these plays Hwang moves away from tales of Chinese American immigrants and themes of race and assimilation to stories about tragic love based on Japanese materials. Although Hwang was successful in having additional plays produced in the mid-1980s and won prestigious fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, it was not until 1988, when M. Butterfly was produced on Broadway, that he achieved astonishing commercial success as well as widespread acclaim. His awards for this play include the Outer Critics Circle Award for best Broadway play, the Drama Desk Award for best new play, the John Gassner Award for best American play, and the Tony Award for best play of the year. By the end of 1988, Hwang was regarded by many critics as the most talented young playwright in the United States, and since then M. Butterfly has been staged in theaters around the world. According to Hwang, M. Butterfly was inspired by newspaper accounts of an espionage trial. In his "Playwright’s Notes" he cites an excerpt from the New York Times for May 11, 1986. Hwang takes this fascinating true story of espionage and astonishing sexual misidentification and transforms it into a complex treatment of social, political, racial, cultural, and sexual issues that has dazzled both audiences and readers with its remarkable eroticism, insights, and beauty.
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