Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang has lived a lot of life. A linguistic auteur, Hwang’s artistic output is vast, with credit numbers crossing into the hundreds across the disciplines of film, television, opera, musical theatre, dance, and of course, his many, many plays. Commonly touted as the most successful Asian American playwright in history, and the only Asian playwright to have ever won a Tony Award, Hwang doesn’t take his position in the culture casually.
“I was a kid who grew up without any images of people who looked like me, who seemed to be actual human beings,” Hwang states. “I guess I've spent my adult life trying to gain access to the levers of American art and popular culture, to turn that story around and portray characters and narratives through my own lens.”
While themes of Chinese American identity and Asian history permeate much of his work, inspiration can strike Hwang in even the most unlikely of environments. M. Butterfly, which marked his Broadway debut, first Tony win, and first Pulitzer nomination, was inspired by a loosely sketched scandal shared at a cocktail party.
“Someone shared the story of this French diplomat who had a 20-year affair with a Chinese actress, and the actress turned out to be A: A Spy. And B: A Man. And when the affair was exposed, the diplomat claimed that he never knew that his lover was a man,” Hwang shares. While the scandal was front page news in France at the time, concrete facts were hard to pin down, especially in the pre-Internet era without access to international journalism. “There was one column on page 26 of the Times,” Hwang emphasizes.
The real-life story became malleable in Hwang’s hands as he crafted a sensible underpinning based on a few primary sources he could get his hands on. This ability to craft effective pathos within a reality-grounded framework has become one of many motifs within Hwang’s work. From the historically based revisal of Flower Drum Song (which reimagined the classic as explicit commentary on Asian assimilation into American culture) to the cutting political satire of Soft Power (where Hillary Clinton was a character), Hwang speaks truth to power through his work, shining a carefully considered light on the foundations of our modern zeitgeist.
Nowhere is this clearer, perhaps, than in Yellow Face, Hwang’s quasi-autobiographical play. The play first premiered in 2007 and is finally making its long-awaited Broadway debut September 13 at the Todd Haimes Theatre, with Daniel Dae Kim playing Hwang himself.
“It is essentially a rewrite or reconceptualization of Face Value,” Hwang shares, referring to his mistaken racial identity comedy that failed to find an audience in the mid 1990s. “Failure is kind of useful, and necessary. Yellow Face is essentially an on-stage mockumentary. It tells the story of a playwright, named DHH, who wrote a play called M. Butterfly, who protests the casting of Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian pimp in Miss Saigon, and then mistakenly casts a white actor as the Asian lead in his own play, called Face Value. And when DHH finds out that he's cast a white guy, he tries to cover up this fact to protect his reputation as an Asian American role model, and…” Hwang smiles, shrugging. “Well, that becomes the basis of a farce.”
My Life in the Theatre is filmed at New York’s Alchemical Studios.
