johndoe@gmail.com
William C. Boles
Hugh F. and Jeannette G. McKean Chair of English, Rollins College
Co-Editor of Methuen Drama Agitations Series
For over forty-five years David Henry Hwang has been recognized as the leading Asian American playwright in the United States and he and his plays have been honored with multiple awards, including Tonys and Obies, while also being produced around the world. Explore Hwang’s plays through this introduction by expert William C. Boles and read passages of plays and linked resources.
Many of David Henry Hwang’s plays are inspired by autobiographical material, especially as it relates to his identity as an Asian American whose parents were both immigrants to the United States. Hwang’s parents came to the United States to attend college. They met at the University of Southern California, married, and raised three children, with David being the eldest. His parents believed their children should be completely immersed in American culture, desiring them to be fully assimilated. Their decision would provide a crucial recurring theme in Hwang’s plays—the tension surrounding being Asian American. His characters experience continual prejudices tied to external appearance, specifically how an Asian face is not automatically assumed to be an American face, drawing questions about where one actually comes from and how one learned to speak English so well.
Hwang began crafting his first produced play when he attended a summer playwriting workshop with Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornes between his junior and senior year at Stanford University. FOB went through various iterations, including a production at Stanford, directed by Hwang, and its selection for the prestigious Eugene O’Neill National Playwright’s Conference, where it came to the attention of Joseph Papp, who would produce FOB and other plays by Hwang in the 1980s, including The Sound of a Voice and The Dance and the Railroad.
Inspired by an evening spent with his cousin and a college student from Hong Kong, Hwang explores the complicated biases of Asian American identity in the late 1970s by featuring three characters of different identity statuses. Dale is ABC (American Born Chinese), and he has completely assimilated into American culture, seeing John Travolta’s walk in Saturday Night Fever as the embodiment of American masculinity. Despite his vociferous arguments about the hierarchical importance of his American identity, he reveals over the evening that while he embraces all things American, his Caucasian friends do not embrace him back. Grace, Dale’s cousin, arrived in the United States at age ten and blends her American identity (blonde hair) with her acceptance of her Chinese identity. Steve is an FOB (Fresh off the Boat) and the subject of Dale’s vituperative and prejudicial attacks at not being American. The play begins with Dale educating the audience about all things negative associated with FOBs. Blended with the tension between the three students is Hwang’s theatrically innovative (and at times clunky) attempt to incorporate Chinese opera and myth into the play, as occurs in the second act where Grace and Steve battle with one another as they adopt the identities of Chinese warriors, Gwan Gung and Fa Mu Lan, both of which were inspired by Hwang reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.
While Hwang’s later plays would explore Caucasian biases against Asian Americans, in FOB as well as The Dance and the Railroad and Family Devotions, which make up his Asian American trilogy, Hwang indicts the prejudices present in one’s own ethnic group.
Read FOB Act 1, Scene 2
Hwang’s follow up to his international hit M. Butterfly was Bondage, which was inspired by his relationship with Kathryn Laing, his second wife. Hwang and his first wife, a Chinese Canadian, divorced shortly after the success of M. Butterfly. His second marriage to the Caucasian actress Laing challenged Hwang to consider the stereotypes, expectations, and cultural differences which occur in mixed race relationships. Drawing upon the many conversations he and Laing had throughout their dating, Hwang crafted a play which aimed to remove the influential power of skin color on the success or failure of a romantic relationship.
Set in an S&M parlor, Terri, a dominatrix and played by Laing in the original production, and Mark, her submissive, role play through various ethnic pairings, including African American woman/Caucasian man, Asian American woman/ Asian American man, and Caucasian woman/ Caucasian man. What allows Hwang’s actors to explore the multiple ethnic roles is his use of bondage gear, which completely covers the actors’ bodies, including a mask over their faces. In essence, the ethnic identity of the actor has been stripped away. By hiding the ethnic identities of the actors, Hwang enables the audience to think not about the skin color of the person speaking but instead about the different aspects of stereotype, bias, and prejudice embodied by our own sense of how ethnicity works. The play ends with the revealing of their identities, Mark, being Asian American, and Terri, being Caucasian, echoing Hwang’s own relationship with Laing.
The two resolve to escape the private walls of the bondage parlor and go forth into society with their mixed-race relationship, recognizing that a changing, but not changing fast enough, prejudicial American society awaits them. As Mark says, “The rules that governed behavior in the last era are crumbling, but those of the time to come have yet to be written.”
Perhaps the most autobiographical of his plays, Hwang’s Yellow Face shares a similar DNA with documentary theatre, which relies upon interviews, newspaper articles, transcripts, government documents and the like to craft a story around a real event. Two recent powerful examples of documentary theatre are Gillian Slovo’s The Riots and Grenfell: in the words of survivors. However, Hwang blends real and fictional material, blurring the lines of what is actually fact and fiction in the play. For example, while he quotes from real politicians, celebrities, and newspaper headlines, he fabricates news stories and their quotes, while also embedding fictional characters into conversations with real people. The result is not documentary theatre, but mockumentary theatre.
Hwang is the main character of the play, called DHH, and the first act details a slice of DHH’s professional career, starting with winning a Tony for M. Butterfly, detailing his scuffle with Broadway producers over the use of yellow face in Miss Saigon, and highlighting his catastrophic failure of Face Value, a farce about the Miss Saigon controversy that closed on Broadway in previews. Hwang skewers himself and the yellow face controversy by having DHH inadvertently cast a white actor to play the Asian lead of his play. Once he discovers his mistake he comedically works to hide the fact of his own yellow face casting. Each attempt to keep the secret only manages to increase Marcus’s standing in the Asian American community, leading to his casting as the King in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I.
While the first act borders on farce, the second act becomes more serious, involving a subplot about Hwang’s father, who is called HYH. During the 1990s and 2000s U.S. government agencies believed there was a Chinese conspiracy afoot in the country to spy and influence elections. Asian faces became suspect. Hwang’s father was caught up in the suspicion, associated with a scandal about Chinese money funding President Clinton’s re-election campaign. Hwang details the accusations against HYH, leading to the play’s pivotal scene where a reporter from The New York Times interviews DHH, probing his own involvement in the possible scandal, and in the process questions the authenticity of DHH’s American identity because of the color of his skin.
Throughout the play Hwang draws upon headlines from national newspapers, statements from government officials, and comments from celebrities critiquing the Chinese-American identity in the 1990s, and in the process by blurring the political reality of governmental bias against the Chinese, and by proximity Chinese Americans, and the semi-fictionalized autobiographical information about himself and his father, Hwang challenges the audience to question the problematic nature of how identity is defined ethnically and nationally.
Yellow Face became Hwang’s most successful play since M. Butterfly and it received a Pulitzer Prize nomination, much like M. Butterfly did, some 20 years earlier. However, Tracy Letts own autobiographically inspired play about growing up in Oklahoma August: Osage County ended up winning the Pulitzer over Hwang’s work.
Of the collection of Hwang works discussed here, Chinglish is the least autobiographical, but the play was inspired by the numerous trips he took to China in the 2000s, where government agencies consulted with him about how they could craft a Chinese musical that would transfer to Broadway.(In addition to his numerous plays, Hwang was associated with two successful Disney musicals, Aida and Tarzan, as well as rewriting the book to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical Flower Drum Song.) While none of the projects materialized, he did encounter numerous times uncomfortable English translations of Chinese phrases, including a sign for a disabled bathroom that said “Deformed Man’s Toilet.” Because of these experiences, Chinglish was born.
In the play Daniel, a failed Enron businessman, travels to China to make a deal that would allow his family’s business to supply dual language signs in government. Daniel, speaking no Mandarin, has to rely on government provided translators to communicate with his possible business partners. As each meeting moves forward, he finds himself paired with inept translators who misstate his words to comedic effect. For example, when he describes his family business as small, the translator describes his company as “tiny and insignificant.” However, Xi, a government official who speaks English, makes it clear that the mistranslations work both ways with English speaking companies using Mandarin script incorrectly as well.
In the midst of his struggles to work through the Chinese bureaucracy, he and Xi become lovers, and she helps him win his contract by becoming a reliable translator and touting his company to her husband, who makes the ultimate decision. However, just like the mistranslation that occurs through the language between the two countries, the relationship between Daniel and Xi is viewed through two differing lenses. For Daniel, Xi is a perfect partner, and he is willing to leave his wife for her. But, for Xi, their relationship is merely an escape from her marriage contract, which she can never break, even if she finds it stultifying. For the Chinese marriage is not about love (Xi calls love an American religion), but instead an institutional relationship that is never broken. While she enjoys her time with Daniel, she also uses their business contract to improve her husband’s place in the government. The play ends with Daniel, who focuses on the perils of miscommunication and cultural misunderstanding, going on a lecture tour to other entrepreneurs to help them navigate the difficulties of doing business in China.
As the United States’ leading Asian American dramatist, Hwang has, unsurprisingly, been the focus of scholarly assessment for over forty years. Esther Kim Lee’s The Theatre of David Henry Hwang is one of two book length studies of Hwang’s plays. Lee’s book draws upon interviews with Hwang and his artistic partners to augment her analysis of his entire oeuvre. In addition, two other Bloomsbury books offer critical consideration of Hwang’s work. In Modern American Drama: Playwriting in the 1908s: Voices, Documents, New Interpretations Hwang’s plays from the 1980s are discussed, including FOB. In addition, drawing upon Hwang’s archives two early draft versions of scenes from M. Butterfly are compared with their final counterparts. Finally, Post-Truth Theatre contains a discussion of Soft Power. Hwang’s self-called drama with music connects Donald Trump’s first term as president with the violent stabbing Hwang received while he was walking home in Brooklyn.
Image: Hwang, David Henry (Photo by Gregory Constanzo).
The plays discussed here can be found in the TCG Books Play Collection: American Drama. Territorial restrictions apply. If you would like to explore this collection further and your institution does not yet have access, please ask your librarian to contact us to arrange a free trial.
Visit our Previously Featured Content page to view other topics including The Plays of Lucy Prebble, Feminist Theatre and the Prison System, Shakespeare and Queer Theory, Global Theatre in Translation, Decolonizing the Theatre Space, Devising Theatre, Interpreting Shakespeare: Discover the First Folio, The Plays of Caryl Churchill, Women in Shakespeare, Drama without Borders: Stories of migrants and refugees, The Climate Crisis in Theatre, Black British Playwrights, and LGBTQ+ Playwrights.
