David Henry Hwang

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David Henry Hwang (born August 11, 1957) is an American playwright, librettist, screenwriter, and theater professor at Columbia University in New York City.

Early life

Henry Yuan Hwang, the bank's founder, and Dorothy Hwang, a piano teacher, were born in Los Angeles, California, in 1957. He has two younger siblings, making him the oldest of three children. He obtained a bachelor's degree in English from Stanford University in 1979 and attended the Yale School of Drama from 1980 to 1981, taking literature classes. Since he already had a play being staged in New York, he decided to stop workshopping new plays. After studying playwriting with Sam Shepard and Marene Fornés at Stanford University, his first play was produced at the Okada House dormitory (named Junipero House at the time). He studied playwriting with Sam Shepard and attended Padua Hills Playwrights Festival in summer 1978, which led to his first plays, including FOB.

Personal life

From 1985 to 1989, Hwang was married to Ophelia Chong. He married actress Kathryn Layng in 1993. They have two children together.

Hwang was the victim of a stabbing near his home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in November 2015. The assassination began in the neck, severing his vertebral artery, before rushing away from the scene. Hwang was seriously ill and underwent surgery before being released from the hospital. The assault seemed to be random, as nothing was taken; the assassination was never found. In The New York Times, Hwang chronicled the incident. The shooting had also sparked a semi-autobiographical section of Soft Power, in which the lead character, David Henry Hwang, is also named. A random stabbing was perpetrated.

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Career

In the modern world, Hwang's early plays worried about the role of the Chinese American and Asian American in the modern world. FOB's first play, which was released in 2000, explores the differences and conflicts between established Asian Americans and new immigrants on "Fresh Off the Boat." The play was produced by the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center and premiered in 1980 Off-Broadway at the Joseph Papp Public Theater. It was named an Obie Award. Papp produced four more of Hwang's plays, including two in 1981: The Dance and the Railroad, which tells the tale of a young Chinese opera performer working as a coolie worker in the 19th-century American West, and Family Devotions, a darkly comic portrayal of Western religion's effects on a Chinese-American family. This was nominated for the Drama Desk Award. Those three performances rounded out what the author called a "Trilogy of Chinese America."

Papp's latest creation, Sound and Beauty, the omnibus title to two Hwang one-act plays set in Japan, was also produced. Hwang started working on small screen projects at this time. Blind Alleys, written by Hwang and Frederic Kimball and starring Pat Morita and Cloris Leachman, was released in 1985 and followed a television version of The Dance and the Railroad.

Rich Relations, his first full-length film to include non-Asian characters, was his first full-length play. It premiered at the Second Stage Theatre in New York.

M. Butterfly, Hwang's most well-known performance, debuted on Broadway in 1988. The performance is a deconstruction of Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly, drawing attention to recent accounts of the twentieth-century friendship between French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu, a male Chinese opera singer, in the United States. During their twenty-year marriage, Shi ostensibly told Boursicot that he was a woman. Multiple awards were given 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 were among the play's accolades. It was the first of three of his works to qualify for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in the first category.

Hwang's passions have piqued in a variety of fields, including opera, film, and the musical theatre, as a result of M. Butterfly's success. Hwang, a world-famous composer, became a regular collaborator as a librettist with the world-famous composer Philip Glass.

David Geffen, one of M. Butterfly's Broadway developers, oversaw a film version of the play, which was directed by David Cronenberg. Hwang also wrote Golden Gate, an original script that was created by American Playhouse. Hwang wrote an early draft of a screenplay based on A. S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning book Possession, which was originally scheduled to be directed by Sydney Pollack. Helen LaBute, a playwright, and Laura Jones, a year later, will work on a script for a 2002 film.

Hwang continued to write for the stage, including short plays for the famous Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in the 1990s. In 1996, his full-length Golden Child made its world premiere at South Coast Repertory. Golden Child was born in New York City later this year. For Hwang's 1996 off-Broadway production, it received the Obie Award for playwriting. It was born on Broadway in 1998 and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play that year.

Hwang had two Broadway hits back-to-back in the new millennium. Director Robert Falls had invited him to help co-write the book for Aida (based on Giuseppe Verdi's opera). It had failed in regional theatre tryouts in a previous iteration. Hwang and Falls re-wrote a substantial portion of the novel (by Linda Woolverton). Aida (with music and lyrics by Elton John and Tim Rice) opened in 2000 and was extremely profitable.

Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, II, and Joseph Fields' musical Flower Drum Song were among his forthcoming projects. Although it was a hit in the 1950s and early 1960s, it has now become outdated. The Civil Rights Movement and other cultural shifts have thrown a new light on Asian American communities, which had largely inaccurate representations of Asian American ethnic groups. Despite the fact that it had never been a complete critical success, the performances prompted another generation of Asian Americans to reimagine this musical. It was based on C. Y. Lee's book The Flower Drum Song, and it reveals the culture clash that a Chinese family lives in San Francisco.

The Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization enabled Hwang to significantly rework the story while keeping character names and songs intact. His 2002 film, both an homage to the original and a modern re-thinking, earned him his third Tony award. Despite the fact that Flower Drum Song was often described as the first musical with an all-Asian cast, the original production featured many non-Asians in lead roles, including Caucasians and an African-American (Juanita Hall). The 2002 revival was also toured throughout Asia with an all-Asian cast of actor-singers.

The 2007 play Yellow Face by Hwang refers to his play Face Value, which closed in previews on Broadway in the early 1990s. He wrote it in response to a controversy surrounding Jonathan Pryce's casting in a Eurasian role in Miss Saigon. Face Value, which included music and lyrics for a musical-within-a-play by Hwang, has lost millions of dollars. It was a stumbling block in Hwang and producer Stuart Ostrow's careers.

In Yellow Face, Hwang wrote a semi-autobiographical play starring him as the main protagonist in a media parody of mistaking racial identity. Face Value had also highlighted this as a significant factor.

Yellow Face debuted in Los Angeles in 2007 at the Mark Taper Forum as a joint venture with East West Players. It was relocated from Broadway to the Joseph Papp Public Theater, an important venue for Hwang's earlier appearances. It was an extended run at the Papp, winning Hwang's third Obie Award for Playwriting. The play was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

For the Papp's night of performances, Hwang also wrote The Great Helmsman, a short play.

Hwang has continued to work in opera and musical theatre, as well as for children's theatre. Hwang co-wrote the English-language libretto for an operatic interpretation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which also includes parts of the libretto by Korean composer Unsuk Chin. It made its world premiere at the Bavarian State Opera in 2007 and was released on DVD in 2008.

Howard Shore's opera The Fly was based on David Cronenberg's 1986 film of the same name. The opera premiered on July 2, 2008 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, France, with Cronenberg as director and Plácido Domingo conducting.

Hwang produced the libretto for Tarzan, a Broadway musical based on a Walt Disney Pictures film that was shot on Broadway.

Hwang was also involved in the multi-media event Icarus at the Edge of Time, which was based on Brian Greene's book of the same name. It featured music by Philip Glass as well as a film by "Al and Al." The piece premiered as part of the World Science Festival.

Chinglish, Hwang's performance at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, earned a rushed return to Broadway in October 2011. It received the Joseph Jefferson Award. Chinglish's frequent visits to China and his observations of Chinese and American people's interactions. Chinglish tickets were conservative.

For the evening of plays The DNA Trail, devised by Jamil Khoury and premiered at the historic Chicago Temple Building, Hwang's short story A Very DNA Reunion was written.

In Washington, D.C., Hwang worked on a theater commission for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Arena Stage. This was a musical interpretation of Aimee Mann's album The Forgotten Armour, starring Mann and Paul Bryant. Justin Lin and Jonathan Caouette also worked on screenplays for DreamWorks Animation and directors. On YouTube, a Yellow Face production premiered in 2013. Jeff Liu directed and adapted it, and Sab Shimono was one of several actors.

In 2014, two new Hwang plays were premiered. The first film, Kung Fu, about Bruce Lee's life premiered as a part of his stay at the Signature Theatre Off-Broadway. Cole Horibe, who had gained success in the television series So You Think You Can Dance, opened the play on February 24, 2014. Cain and Abel, one of many plays included in The Mysteries, was one of two scripts re-telling Bible tales. The Mysteries were also featured in Ed Sylvanus Iskander's work, including playwright Craig Lucas, Dael Orlandersmith, Jose Rivera, and Jeff Whitty.

In 2014, Hwang joined the Columbia University School of the Arts Theatre Program's Playwriting Faculty. He was made the director of the Playwriting Concentration and will serve as an Associate Professor of Playwriting. Hilton Als of New York has referred to him as "the most influential Chinese playwright this country has produced."

In 2016, Hwang became a writer and consultant for the Golden Globe-winning television series The Affair, and in 1993, he performed "Solo" in association with Prince Harry.

Dream of the Red Chamber, an opera by Hwang and Bright Sheng based on the eighteenth-century Chinese book of the same name, premiered in the fall of 2016. Hwang took over the American Theatre Wing's board in the summer of 2016.

Soft Power by Hwang premiered at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, California, in the spring of 2018. Jeanine Tesori's music and additional lyrics are included in the book. Its cast is largely Asian. In September 2019, the Public Theater in Off-Broadway debuted it (previews). 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.

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