David Henry Hwang Keeps Things Real. He Even Puts Himself In His Plays

My life in the theatre

David Henry Hwang Keeps Things Real. He Even Puts Himself In His Plays

In anticipation of Yellow faceIn his Broadway debut, the Tony Award-winning playwright opens up about the true origins of some of his most famous works.

Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang has lived many lives. As a linguistic auteur, Hwang’s artistic output is vast, with credits running into the hundreds in film, television, opera, musical theater, dance, and of course his many, many plays. Hwang is often touted as the most successful Asian American playwright in history, and the only Asian playwright ever to win a Tony Award. He doesn’t take his place in the culture lightly.

“I was a kid growing up without images of people who looked like me, who seemed like real people,” Hwang says. “I think I’ve spent my adult life trying to access the levers of American art and popular culture, to flip that narrative and portray characters and stories through my own lens.”

While themes of Chinese-American identity and Asian history inform much of his work, Hwang can find inspiration even in the most unlikely settings. M. Butterflywhich made his Broadway debut, won his first Tony Award, and earned his first Pulitzer nomination, was inspired by a scandal revealed at a cocktail party.

“Someone shared the story of a French diplomat who had an affair with a Chinese actress for 20 years, and the actress turned out to be A: A spy. And B: A man. And when the affair came out, 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 hard to come by, especially in the pre-internet era without access to international journalism. “There was An column on page 26 of the Times,” Hwang points out.

The real story became malleable in Hwang’s hands as he created a sensible rationale based on the few primary sources he could get his hands on. This ability to effectively create pathos within a reality-based framework has become one of the many motifs in Hwang’s work. From the historically based revision of Flower Drum Song (who reimagined the classic as an explicit commentary on Asian assimilation into American culture) to the cutting political satire of Soft power (in which Hillary Clinton was a character), Hwang speaks truth to power through his work, shedding a measured light on the foundations of our modern zeitgeist.

Nowhere is this 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 rewriting or reconceptualization of Nominal value,” Hwang shares, referring to his comedy about mistaken racial identity that failed to find an audience in the mid-1990s. “Failure is useful and necessary in a way. Yellow face is essentially a mockumentary on stage. It tells the story of a playwright named DHH who wrote a play called M. Butterflywho protests the casting of Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian pimp in Mrs Saigon, and then accidentally cast a white actor as the Asian lead in his own play called Nominal value. And when DHH finds out he cast a white man, he tries to cover it up to protect his reputation as an Asian American role model, and…” Hwang smiles and shrugs. “Well, That becomes the basis of a farce.”

My Life in the Theater was filmed at Alchemical Studios in New York.