David Henry Hwang remains realistic. He brings himself into his pieces

My life in the theatre

David Henry Hwang remains realistic. He brings himself into his pieces

Before Yellow faceIn his Broadway debut, the Tony Award-winning playwright tells the true origins of some of his most famous works.

Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang has lived a lot. A writer with a gift for languages, Hwang's artistic output is vast, with hundreds of credits across film, television, opera, musical theater, dance, and of course his many, many plays. Widely considered the most successful Asian American playwright in history and the only Asian playwright to ever win a Tony Award, Hwang does not take his position in the culture lightly.

“I grew up as a child without images of people who looked like me, who seemed to be real people,” Hwang says. “I guess I've spent my whole adult life trying to access the levers of American art and pop culture, flipping that history and portraying characters and narratives through my own lens.”

While themes of Chinese American identity and Asian history permeate much of his work, Hwang can find inspiration in even the most unlikely settings. M. Butterflywhich marked his Broadway debut, his first Tony win, and his first Pulitzer nomination, was inspired by a loosely sketched scandal shared at a cocktail party.

“Someone told the story of a 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 he never knew his lover was a man,” Hwang says. Although the scandal made headlines in France at the time, concrete facts were difficult to establish, especially in the pre-Internet era and without access to international journalism. “There were one column on page 26 of the Times,” Hwang emphasizes.

The true story became malleable in Hwang's hands when he created a reasonable foundation based on some of the primary sources he got his hands on. This ability to create effective pathos within a realistic framework has become one of many motifs in Hwang's work. From the historically informed revision of Flower Drum Song (which reinterpreted the classic as an explicit commentary on Asian assimilation into American culture) to the biting political satire of Gentle power (which starred Hillary Clinton), Hwang's work speaks truth to power while carefully examining the foundations of our modern zeitgeist.

Nowhere is this perhaps more evident than in Yellow faceHwang's quasi-autobiographical play. The play premiered in 2007 and will finally make its long-awaited Broadway debut on September 13 at the Todd Haimes Theatre, with Daniel Dae Kim playing Hwang himself.

“It is essentially a rewrite or redesign of Nominal value”, says Hwang, referring to his comedy about the confusion of ethnic identity, which failed to find an audience in the mid-1990s. “Failure is somehow useful and necessary. Yellow face is essentially a mockumentary on stage. It tells the story of a playwright named DHH who wrote a play called M. Butterflywho opposed the casting of Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian pimp in Miss Saigon, and then mistakenly casts a white actor as the Asian lead in his own play, called Nominal value. And when DHH finds out he cast a white guy, he tries to cover up that fact to protect his reputation as an Asian-American role model, and…” Hwang smiles and shrugs. “Well, The becomes the basis of a farce.”

“My Life in the Theatre” was filmed at New York’s Alchemical Studios.