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David Henry Hwang
Biography
David Henry Hwang (b. 1957) Born in Los Angeles
to immigrants, his father a banker and his mother a professor of piano,
Hwang graduated from Stanford University in 1979. But by 1978 he had
already written his first play, FOB (Fresh Off the Boat), which won the
1981 Obie Award as the best new play of the season when Joseph Papp
brought it to off-Broadway in New York. Hwang attended the famous Yale
School of Drama during 1980 and 1981. Two more promising plays, The Dance
and the Railroad and Family Devotions, based on the problems of
immigrants¡Xtrying, sometimes, to assimilate and sometimes to avoid
assimilation in a new culture¡Xappeared in 1981. His 1985 marriage to
Ophelia Y. M. Chong, an artist, ended in divorce. Hwang continued to write
and direct during the 1980s, moving from the relatively narrow early
material to "wider concerns of race, gender, and culture." His 1988
Broadway hit, M. Butterfly, won the Tony Award for best play, and
established him as a major modern American playwright. A critic writing in
Time argued that "the final scene of M. Butterfly, when the agony of one
soul finally takes precedence over broad-ranging commentary, is among the
most forceful in the history of the American theater.... If Hwang can
again fuse politics and humanity, he has the potential to become the first
important dramatist of American public life since Arthur Miller, and maybe
the best of them all." His recent work includes 1,000 Airplanes on the
Roof: A Science Fiction Music Drama (1989), a collaboration with Philip
Glass and Jerome Sirlin. (Source:
Ingrid Kerkhoff, Contemporary American Drama)
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Relevant Links
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