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David Henry Hwang is a playwright, screenwriter, and librettist from Los Angeles, California. He wrote the plays Yellow Face, Tibet through the Red Box (adapted from Peter Sis' book), Golden Child, Face Value, M. Butterfly, Rich Relations, Family Devotions, and FOB as well as the short plays Jade Flowerpots and Bound Feet, Trying to Find Chinatown, Bang Kok, Bondage, As the Crow Flies, The Sound of a Voice, The House of Sleeping Beauties (adapted from Yasunari Kawabata's novella House of the Sleeping Beauties), and The Dance and the Railroad. Along with Stephan Muller, he adapted Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt. He wrote the libretti to the operas The Fly (with music by Howard Shore, based upon the David Cronenberg film), Ainadamar (with music by Osvaldo Golijov), The Silver River (with music by Bright Sheng), The Sound of a Voice, and The Voyage (both with music by Philip Glass). He wrote the libretti to the musicals Tarzan (with music by Phil Collins, based upon the screenplay by Tab Murphy, Bob Tzudiker, and Noni White and the novel Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs), Flower Drum Song (with music by Richard Rodgers; lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein, II based upon the libretto by Hammerstein and Joseph Fields and the novel The Flower Drum Song by C. Y. Lee), and Aida (co-written with Linda Woolverton and Robert Falls; music by Elton John; lyrics by Tim Rice, based upon the opera by Giuseppe Verdi and Antonio Ghislanzoni). He wrote the screenplays for the films Possession (co-written with Laura Jones and Neil LaBute, based upon the novel by A. S. Byatt), Golden Gate, and M. Butterfly (based upon his play). He also wrote the television mini-series The Lost Empire. He wrote the texts for the music-theatre piece 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof (with music by Glass) and for the dance pieces After Eros (choreography by Maureen Fleming), Dances in Exiles, and Yellow Punk Dolls (both with choreography by Ruby Shang) as well as the lyrics for the song "Solo" (co-written with Prince) for the album Come. He was educated at the Yale School of Drama and Stanford University.

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Something was happening in California in the late 1970's that was similar to the Civil Rights Movement of the late sixties. Budding Asian American consciousness had hit college campuses. Groups formed to begin examining the meaning of being from Asian descent in the melting pot of America where Caucasians were becoming a plurality rather than a majority. At Stanford University, a young Chinese-American student named David Henry Hwang was beginning to discover the power of the theatre while playing in pit orchestras for musicals and studying with novelist John L'Hereux. These two events collided at just the perfect time for Hwang to complete a play called FOB (from the term "Fresh Off the Boat") that took elements of Chinese folk tales and opera and clashed them with a story of young ABC ("American Born Chinese") in L. A. The play, in metaphor and spirit, dramatized the pros and cons of being a hyphenated American.

Hwang has since risen to prominence as the preeminent Asian American playwright, being the first person of Asian descent to win the Tony Award for Best Play and opening up the professional New York theatre to the stories of Asian Americans that groups like the East West Players and playwrights like Frank Chin had been telling out West. He has also been a part of major works for the musical theatre and opera and has told his stories through film and television. A writer who tells universal tales in unique ways and who has a keen interest in diversifying his craft into many different forms, he has forged an inspiring career that is as unique as his take on this country and its diverse inhabitants.

As mentioned above, Hwang's first play was FOB. The Stanford Asian American Theatre Project produced the first staging of the piece at the Okada House Dormitory in 1979 while Hwang was still a student. He was encouraged to send the play to the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Connecticut. Many playwrights, such as August Wilson and Christopher Durang had to submit several times before the Conference took the bait, but Hwang's FOB was snatched up and developed at the Center shortly thereafter. The famous producer Joseph Papp (who had brought Hair and outdoor Shakespeare to New York) saw the play and found a place for it as his Public Theatre in New York. This stunning success at such a young age was more than likely due to the freshness of the material—it was a subject largely foreign to East Coast theatre audiences.

The play premiered at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1980 under the direction of the legendary actor/director Mako (of The Sand Pebbles fame), who organized a fresh young cast that included the less than prolific but graceful and supremely talented John Lone (who had been trained in the Peking Opera and who would later impress audiences in The Last Emperor) and Tzi Ma, an equally talented and familiar face (if not name) in Hollywood. The play was an instant success and brought New York Times drama critic Frank Rich, the so-called "Butcher of Broadway," Off-Broadway to examine the talents of the writer. Over the next decade, Rich would be Hwang's most fervent supporter, though with his always critical eye, he would not be afraid to help the playwright along with corrective criticisms.

FOB is now probably the first play to read for those interested in Asian American theatre, along with Chin's The Year of the Dragon. All of the concerns, frustrations, and also the glories of the immigrant/assimilation experience were found in its words. It was also the mixture and clash of the Peking Opera and American Broadway-style comedy that set Hwang's plays apart from other New York offerings. The play won an Obie Award for Best American Play and was quickly anthologized in "Best Of" Books. It would also begin a relationship between Hwang, Papp, and Rich that would be beneficial to establishing Hwang's assured place among the important playwrights of his generation.

Hwang's next project he set about to write as he left L. A. for life in New York was to be a children's play commissioned by the New Federal Theatre. The simple, elegant language and small-scale theatrical power of the piece was retained, but The Dance and the Railroad emerged as another powerful, important work of the Chinese-American experience for the larger, professional theatre. The story concerns two Chinese railroad "coolie" laborers in the middle part of the nineteenth century. This historical perspective was another combination of American theatre and the Chinese opera—the lead role written for and given the name of Lone.

Through long, aria-like monologues and hilarious vignettes, the play pits a worker who is at strike with the rest of the coolies (Ma—a part written for the FOB actor) encountering a worker who chooses the strike as time to practice the art of the Opera. Ma challenges Lone to teach him the art and he becomes a dedicated student as the strike is won. Lone also directed the piece and choreographed the Opera movements for the show, which had its professional premiere (again at the Public) in 1981.

The Dance and the Railroad surprised its author when it was revealed it had been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Drama Desk Award. The play has often confused the author that it has been so honored as it is such a simple play. But, it is Hwang's voice, on full display with its quirky humor as well as the longer, poetic passages that is at the center of the piece that makes it such a mammoth experience. Also, its look at the experience of the Asian American from a historical perspective prepared Hwang for more versatility in his works. Lone and Ma's performances were recorded in a television version of the play (directed by Dirty Dancing filmmaker Emile Ardolino), which aired on ABC's Arts Channel. The production won a CINE Golden Eagle Award, but is sadly not available commercially.

Hwang refers to his first three stage works as his "Trilogy on Chinese America" and as part of his "isolationist-nationalist" phase. His most critical, serious, and disturbing work of this early period was Family Devotions, the final play of this trilogy. The play concerns three generations of an Asian-American family living in a wealthy suburb of L. A. Two elderly women—Ama and Popo—are at the delicious, comic center of the first act. But, more than any work before it, Hwang's play becomes deadly and frightening in the second act as Di-Gou—a relative from China's mainland—returns and participates in the Christian devotions of this family. Ultimately, the play is about the effects of Western religion on the American Chinese and this provides Hwang with his most intense criticism of the culture. The play also opened in 1981 at the Public under the direction of Robert Allan Ackerman, who had directed FOB at the O'Neill Center. The play featured the largest cast of Hwang's up to that point and an ensemble was created featuring several favorite Asian-American actors of that time and of the years following: Michael Paul Chan (recently of Arrested Development), Hwang veteran Jodi Long, Lauren Tom (who would later be featured prominently in The Joy Luck Club), and Victor Wong (Big Trouble in Little China).

This production was also nominated for a Drama Desk Award. Family Devotions, as hinted at earlier, does stand out as an angrier play from Hwang, who has embraced his humor more in his later career (going from "isolationist-nationalist" to a more comfortable assimilation). Still, the play remains hilariously funny—it almost appears as a farcical black comedy, but its final moments are also some of the most heavily effective in Hwang's canon. The play is also noteworthy for showing off Hwang's talent at surprising scenic choices. The stage is divided in half and features a tennis court and sunroom/lanai. The disjointed set helps to emphasize the play's difficult dichotomies. In fact, the setting was inspired by a class assignment at the Yale School of Drama, which Hwang briefly attended during that time.

Hwang would then set out to do something else entirely. His next few plays would branch out from the Chinese American experience and look at other cultures as a test of his versatility. He did not venture far from Asia, however, for his next two projects—a pair of one-acts (originally performed together) that were based on the art of Japan. Hwang had become pessimistic about relationships between men and women—his first wife, the artist Ophelia Y. M. Chong, and he would separate shortly before the success of M. Butterfly—and both plays would highlight a mutual distrust from the men and women in them.

Hwang turned to adaptation as a source of inspiration. The Nobel Prize-winning writer Yasunari Kawabata had written a novella called House of the Sleeping Beauties, which his friend and supporter Yukio Mishima had called "an esoteric masterpiece." It told the story of old Eguchi and his visit to a mysterious brothel with seemingly comatose women whom the customer would simply sleep with without engaging in sex. Hwang decided to write a play about how Kawabata might have come to write such a story. Kawabata is the central figure as he investigates a brothel he has heard about from his friend (Eguchi) and it also features Kawabata in his moment of death.

The second play was even more somber than The House of Sleeping Beauties and had less of a focus on language and more of a focus on the silence in between the words. The Sound of a Voice is a historical story (based upon Japanese ghost folk tales and films) about a samurai who stumbles upon the house of a woman rumored to be a witch. The plays went nicely together and were therefore produced as a single evening's entertainment, under the title Sound and Beauty, again at the Public.

It would be his last theatrical project with Lone, who directed both plays and performed the role of the Man in The Sound of a Voice. It opened in 1983. The House of Sleeping Beauties again featured Wong, who played the role of Kawabata. The plays earned Hwang his first negative reviews. Rich found both stories shorts contrived and less mature than Hwang's previous work. Still, the plays didn't incite Rich's normal butchering as it was apparent he found this writer special.

Both works, I believe, show a writer at his stunning best. Critics often have trouble with writers changing direction if they're on a roll. The House of Sleeping Beauties features lines of aching beauty and a truly touching death scene between the older pair. Also, an early scene of a game played by the two shows a writer with an extreme verbal dexterity and clearness of dramatic thought. The Sound of a Voice remains more elusive and is more striking in performance than on paper, but it has one of the most effective and stunning climaxes in all of Hwang's plays as a woman dangles from a rope, surrounded by the sharp beauty of swirling flowers and the man begins his first notes on the shakuhatchi next door.

Hwang's next few works would continue the dramatization of other peoples of non-Chinese descent. His next short play, As the Crow Flies, tells the story of Hwang's grandmother's African-American cleaning woman. Hwang wrote the play as an alternate companion to The Sound of a Voice for the famous Iranian director Reza Abdoh, who directed the two plays at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1986.

The charming story features two now archetypal Hwang characters in the role of an elderly, deafening Chinese husband and wife. At this point, Hwang had mastered the dialect of American speech in the mouth of the Chinese and many of Mrs. Chan and P. K.'s lines are cleverly constructed and hilarious. The play is not often anthologized with the rest of Hwang's work and is not mentioned by many Hwang chroniclers, but it has a magic all its own and remains to be a lovely play. Dan Sullivan, in the Los Angeles Times, though admitting The Sound of a Voice was a stronger piece, noted the strengths of the play.

One thing Hwang had been impervious to this point was a so-called artistic failure. Rich had not thought highly of Sound and Beauty, but otherwise his work had consistent success. It was at this point that Hwang left the Asian dialect altogether and wrote a play featuring all non-Asian characters. The result was an experiment and a play that would get him out of a three year-long writers' block. The result was Rich Relations, a comedy that returned to spiritual matters as its jumping-off point.

Set in the second living room of a large mansion in the hills above Los Angeles, the play concerns a college teacher returning—escaping, actually—to his real estate baron's father's house with his girlfriend, who happens to be his student. While there, Keith becomes the center of controversy as his aunt Barbara threatens to commit suicide unless he marries her introverted daughter—his first cousin—to improve the money flow between the families. The featured character is Hinson, who is Keith's father and, in the past, had risen from the dead (after a bout with tuberculosis) to get his life re-dedicated to God. Written with an eye toward Neil Simon, but still featuring moments of mysticism typical of a Hwang play, Rich Relations was more of a straight-on comedy than had been written previously.

The play was chosen to be produced by the Second Stage Theatre and the director was the late Harry Kondoleon, who had also had success Off-Broadway as a writer. The cast assembled also featured some great talent. Veteran comic actor Jerry Stiller was to play the role of Hinson, the charming though never wildly successful Keith Szarabajka was cast as Keith, and Hollywood darling Phoebe Cates was making her New York Stage debut as Keith's girlfriend Jill. Sadly, Stiller had to leave the show and was replaced by Joe Silver, who was thought by many to be miscast.

The play opened to universally negative reviews. Still, many do consider Rich Relations to be important in Hwang's work in that his greatest success—M. Butterfly—would largely feature Caucasian characters. The bridge between the two sides of Hwang's work was an important, though difficult one to cross over. Still, Rich Relations is very funny and its second act shift to mystical drama is as potent and beautifully written as any of Hwang's second act interruptions from the otherworldly. The play was important in the respect that its set featured several up-to-date technological devices that were smashed up by the end of the evening. Rich noted it was probably the first play in New York to feature the C. D. as a prop. Rich Relations would go on to be produced with all Asian casts on the West Coast to great acclaim.

The year Rich Relations opened, Hwang had been asked by a friend if he had heard the story of a French diplomat named Bernard Boursicot and a Chinese opera star—Shi Pei Pu. Apparently, the two had carried on a twenty year on-again/off-again affair and Boursicot was under the impression Shi had been a woman the entire time. He was wrong. The story was a scandalous and hilarious headline in Europe. How could he not have known? Hwang had reasoned to himself that he must have thought he had found a "Madame Butterfly." Hwang did not know much about the Giacomo Puccini opera Madama Butterfly, but a "butterfly" had become an Asian-American term for a submissive "Oriental" woman to a white man's desires.

Hwang studied the opera, which had a libretto by Luigi Illicia and Giuseppe Giacosa and was adapted from the play by David Belasco and the novel by John Luther Long. The opera is full of misconceptions about the East and elements that many consider racist now, but it is also the most performed opera in North America, largely due to the unrivaled beauty of the music. Hwang saw a way to deconstruct the opera while telling a fictionalized account of the confused, European man. Hwang had no interest in writing docudrama; he was writing theatrical metaphor that was going to expose national and international issues of Men and Women, East and West. It would be the most talked-about play of the 1980's, an international success, one of the most groundbreaking works to grace the Broadway stage, and give Hwang a permanent spot in theatre history.

The play was originally conceived as a musical. Hwang had always thought musically and would go onto write many works for the music-theatre. But, this notion was dropped early on due to what he perceived would be a lengthy process of possible collaboration. What was formulated was not merely a political diatribe, but an impassioned story of a tragic figure—his betrayals and deceptions as well as his sexual and racial misconceptions. The play was snagged by producer Stuart Ostrow (who had brought Pippin and 1776 to the Broadway stage) and he sent the play to the difficult English director John Dexter. Dexter thought it was the best play he had read in years. The play was soon on its way to Broadway and John Lithgow was chosen to play the lead. Actor B. D. Wong would go through a six month audition for the role of Song Liling (Hwang's name for Shi). Both actors would play roles that many would consider tours de forces and would be hallmarks of their stage careers.

The play got a terrible review in Washington, D. C. as most plays do. But, it found its home when it moved to Broadway in 1988. The play was an immediate success and would go on to run three years. The play was universally praised and found its way to London with Sir Anthony Hopkins and then, all over the world. That year, it won the Tony Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the John Gassner Award, and the Drama Desk Award for Best Play. It was Hwang's second play to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

The play is an astounding piece of work, but has often over-shadowed some of Hwang's other plays. As with most American plays and playwrights (Arthur Miller with Death of a Salesman, Tennessee Williams with A Streetcar Named Desire), dramatists have one big play and are then supposed to achieve this success each time. Such a thing is impossible and most writers become pigeon-holed by their most triumphant success and rarely move on, except in the cases of Eugene O'Neill and Edward Albee, who both found a second wind in their later lives. Nevertheless, sometimes the play is so good the author is uncertain whether they would able to match it and Hwang's output of non-musical plays have been scarce since M. Butterfly. But, the play did propel his career in many different directions—the world of the musical theatre, film, television, and opera.

Hwang's next work for the theatre (four years later) was a short play for the Actors Theatre of Louisville in Kentucky. The piece was called Bondage and, like M. Butterfly, its primary concerns were sexual and gender stereotypes. This was perfectly dramatized in the figure of two completely disguised, clad-in-leather figures—one, a dominatrix and the other, a man visiting an S and M parlor. The play had more of an eye to the nineties and, though serious in its implications, is one of Hwang's funniest plays.

The cast featured once again B. D. Wong and Kathryn Layng, an actress who had appeared in M. Butterfly and was now Hwang's second wife. The actors were not credited in the program as their true race was not to be revealed until the end of the play, when you realize they are the races of the first couple they "role-played," but through the course of the play, they portray several stereotypical racial couplings. The play was directed by Oskar Eustis, the former artistic director of the Trinity Repertory Company and the man who commissioned Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Bondage was produced in tandem with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks' short Devotees in the Garden of Love, under the omnibus title Rites of Mating at the 1992 Humana Festival of New American Plays.

The other reason Hwang's output might have remained scarce during the early 1990's was his next play—the ill-fated Face Value. Hwang had long been involved in an intense battle within the New York theatre community over the casting of English actor Jonathan Pryce as a central Eurasian character in Claude-Michel Schonberg, Alain Boubil, and Richard Maltby, Jr,'s musical Miss Saigon. In fact, the musical's Broadway opening had been postponed by Hwang's (and other's) protests. Hwang decided to respond to this incident with what he would call a "farce of mistaken racial identity." This would be his second project with Broadway producer Ostrow and would showcase Hwang's musical leanings. He would write music and lyrics for a phony show-within-the-show called The Real Manchu, which would be about the famous Asian bounder. The plot followed that the musical would open at the Imperialist Theatre on Broadway and would cause some out-of-work Asian actors to break in backstage and ruin the opening because one of them had been rejected for the lead—which goes to a Caucasian actor named Bernard Sugarmann.

Hwang learned quickly that farce was a difficult theatrical medium. But, veteran comic director Jerry Zaks had been brought into helm the project in Boston and then move to Broadway. Then, B. D. Wong returned to star, along with other well-respected comic actors like (Ally McBeal's) Jane Krakowski, Mark Linn-Baker (of Perfect Strangers fame), and the future star Gina Torres. Rehearsals were hampered by a general confusion over whether the play would ever really work. The farcical moments were not sharp enough for farce and the one scene that did work—a Pirandelloesque scene where the actual actors of the show stop the play to reflect on how stupid and insensitive the play is—was not fully integrated into the rest of the show. The play opened in Boston in 1993 to disastrous reviews. The most damning criticism came from the Boston Globe's Kevin Kelly. But D. C. had not stopped M. Butterfly, and with an eleventh hour revision, Boston didn't seem to stop Face Value, but it did. After eight previews, the producers announced the expensive show would not open. Tickets had failed to be sold and it looked like bad news. Ostrow would not be able to produce another show for nearly two decades and Hwang was humiliated.

The rest of the nineties would see Hwang concentrating on supporting his new family and spending less time in the world of non-musical theatre, though 1996 proved to be a very productive year. The next project he would work on was another short for the Humana Festival—this time one of their "ten-minute plays." The piece, Trying to Find Chinatown, had a simple set-up: an Asian street musician confronts a Caucasian man who purports to be Asian and looking for his home in Chinatown. The Asian man is offended while the white man reveals he was adopted by an Asian family and was therefore as much an Asian as the fiddle player.

The play furthered the idea brought up by Hwang in Face Value that there really was no such thing as race. This was quite far removed from the Hwang who had written those first angst-ridden plays of Asian America, but Trying to Find Chinatown is easily one of his most moving plays. The play premiered in 1996 under the direction of Paul McCrane along with other ten-minute plays of that year. The play also became a benchmark of Hwang's drama—the title would also be the title of Hwang's third collection of plays, printed in 1999.

Hwang's second ten-minute play of 1996 was Bang Kok as part of Pieces of the Quilt, Sean San Jose's Magic Theatre experiment in San Francisco. The play, in a largely stylized fashion, featured two guys in a bar—one of whom had contracted A. I. D. S. in Thailand from a prostitute, who interrupts the action as the set breaks apart and tells her story. The play has remained largely un-produced, without a fully professional production, but was printed in various magazines as part of the project.

That year would also see the World Premiere of his next full-length play. Hwang, at the age of ten, had collected the stories of his ancestors from his maternal grandmother, who he thought was dying. Hwang's printing of his family history became an important factor in one of his most mature plays. The story of his grandfather breaking tradition, setting up with Western religion, and un-binding his daughter's feet was captured in Golden Child, an almost classical meditation on family. The play was essentially historical but was book-ended by a contemporary story of a man dealing with his identity in the wake of his new family.

The play premiered Off-Broadway under the direction of James Lapine, who had made a name for himself in the commercial theatre writing and directing the Stephen Sondheim musicals Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and Passion. The original version was a bit long and loose, but Lapine's direction held the project together and gave it grace and beauty. The production won Hwang his second Obie Award for Best Play and gave the director and writer inspiration to get it to the Great White Way.

Hwang decided to take a year and continue to work on the piece. Productions occurred in California and in Singapore before Hwang and Lapine felt like they had finely honed the play. With more of a streamlined essence of the bookends and by bringing the un-binding of the feet onstage, Golden Child became a diamond from the rough. The play opened on Broadway in 1998, making it Hwang's return after a decade away from New York. The play featured the classical Asian-American actor Randall Duk Kim as well as E. R. star Ming-Na Wen, once again Jodi Long, and a find in the newcomer Julyana Soelistyo, who wowed audiences with her portrayal of the "Golden Child," Hwang's grandmother.

Reviews were, on the whole, very encouraging. Indeed, the play gave Hwang his second Tony nomination but, as New York audiences had already seen the play, they did not flock to the Longacre Theatre and the play closed after a relatively short run. Golden Child remains, particularly in the individual scenes with First, Second, and Third Wife, an exceptionally powerful play.

Eustis' collaboration on Bondage had been successful and he decided to invite Hwang to serve for a time as the playwright-in-residence at Trinity Repertory in Providence, Rhode Island. The first idea he shared with Hwang was to re-stage Face Value or commission a new play about the artist Paul Gaugin, but when Swiss director Stephan Muller found himself in New England, Eustis paired the two together and commissioned a new adaptation of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's classical drama Peer Gynt. Gynt has long been a favorite among actors and a challenge for theatre companies because of its length and ties specific to Norway.

The intent of the project was to bring Hwang's characteristic humor to the piece and get a workable length. Muller and Hwang both collaborated on the script, which runs about two hours on stage. The adaptation melds contemporary references and rock songs to the classic tale. It also featured modernized languages and metaphors to tell the story of the "to-thine-own-self-be-true" wanderer. The production ran in 1998 at Trinity and was the first of only two straight play adaptations (as-of-yet) for Hwang. William K. Gale noted in the Providence Journal the adaptation's humor, but he criticized many of the directorial choices.

In the early part of the twenty-first century, Asian-American playwright Chay Yew and the director Lisa Peterson, under direction from the Ma-Yi theatre company, enlisted several playwrights to contribute ten-minute pieces for an evening of plays on the Asian-American experience. Hwang's contribution to this project, Jade Flowerpots and Bound Feet, is a play about a Caucasian woman who tries to pass herself off as Asian in order to sell a book of fiction as a book of memoirs. The play ends on a macabre note as the publisher takes blood from the woman to get proof of her ancestry. The Square, the collective title of all the plays, premiered Off-Broadway in 2001 under the direction of Lisa Peterson and received positive notices. The play was published in the 2004 edition of Best Ten-Minute Plays for Two Actors by Smith and Kraus.

Hwang also composed a children's piece, commissioned by the famous Seattle Children's Theatre. Czech writer Peter Sis had written a slightly autobiographical children's book telling the story of a young man awaiting his father's return from travels in Tibet. The book was critically lauded and Hwang was thought the perfect writer to translate and expand the piece into a full-length play for young audiences. Opera director Francesca Zambello was chosen to stage the piece and Hwang took several liberties with the original story, adding a full Ensemble to bring the world of Tibet alive. Tibet through the Red Box opened in 2004 at the Seattle Children's Theatre and became another elegant work from that company. Although some critics were skeptical of Hwang's loose adaptation, Joe Adcock in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer praised the work.

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The noted, world-famous composer Philip Glass had become aware of Hwang's work in 1983, when he had seen Sound and Beauty in New York. The composer fell in love with the pieces, which he felt he could put to music because they were so sparse and lyrical. Glass would eventually do this, but when he approached Hwang first it was for a very unique project called 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof. The project was to be a three-way collaboration between Hwang, Glass, and the world-class scenic designer Jerome Sirlin.

It would be "melodrama" in the classical sense. An actor would perform a monologue in front of a set and over music. But, in this case, the set would be made up of third-dimensional, holographic designs by Sirlin, the music would be by Glass and performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble, and the monologue would be by Hwang and tell a story of alien abduction.

Hwang's monologue for the piece would take the "arias" of his plays and meld them with his trademark humor and poetic style to create a work that was as haunting and melodious as Glass' score. Sirlin's holographic designs would be praised wherever the show traveled. 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof opened in 1988 at the Vienna International Airport, Hangar #3. Over the course of its North American tour, the central role of M. would be played by rotating actors, including Rocco Sisto (from The Sopranos), and once again Jodi Long.

The piece was praised as a work that brought music-theatre hurdling toward the new millennium. The original music recording would include vocals by Linda Ronstadt, but sadly not the monologue from the show. This piece would establish a good working relationship between Hwang and Glass and would open up Hwang to the world of international theatre.

The next project Hwang and Glass would collaborate on would be their most audacious. The Metropolitan Opera House in New York has commissioned few operas over the course of its history, but they turned to Glass for an opera commission based on the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' "discovery" of the New World. Glass became fascinated by such a project and began a story scenario that would pit Columbus' discovery with the future discoveries of new worlds. It would be a piece that would investigate the concept of discovery and he chose Hwang to compose the libretto, based on his scenario.

The Voyage featured a large cast, including New York musical favorite Douglas Perry and was originally produced in 1992 at the Met under the baton of Bruce Ferden. It would be some time before The Voyage was recorded—in fact more than a decade later, a CD release was finally issued on the Orange Mountain Music label, based on the production at the Landestheater Linz in Austria. The recording was conducted by frequent Glass collaborator Dennis Russell Davies. The Voyage remains perhaps the best example of how Hwang's initial impulses in the theatre can transcend to works of varying topics.

The next opera Hwang would collaborate on was a piece by the noted Chinese-American composer Bright Sheng. A former MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, Sheng's repertoire had grown extensively in the last part of the twentieth century and The Silver River was to be his first theatrical piece. It began as a chamber opera, based upon a classic Chinese folktale. But, the work was expanded into a full-length opera in one act that had its premiere at the Spoleto Festival in 2000. In 2002, the production had its New York premiere under the direction of Ong Ken Sen and was produced at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

A year after the premiere of The Silver River, the world would see another collaboration from Hwang and Glass. Glass' dream of setting Sound and Beauty was finally realized as Robert Woodruff, Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theatre invited Glass and Hwang to write an opera for the theatre instead of an opera house. Using Eastern-oriented instruments for the first time, Glass set The Sound of a Voice and Hwang and Glass collaborated on a riff on The House of Sleeping Beauties called Hotel of Dreams, omitting references to Kawabata. The two pieces premiered as The Sound of a Voice in 2003 at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston under Woodruff's direction and featuring nationally renowned twin singers Eugene and Herbert Perry.

Unlike the original production of Sound and Beauty, Hotel of Dreams (the libretto almost word for word from the script of The House of Sleeping Beauties) became the most haunting piece of the evening and was switched to be the concluding piece. The production also featured the world-class pipa player Wu Man in one of her first collaborations with Glass. Unfortunately, there has not yet been a recording.

One of Hwang's most successful opera collaborations is with the up-and-coming contemporary classical composer who is taking the musical world by storm. Osvaldo Golijov combines Eastern European and Spanish-influenced music to create a very distinct style that led people to believe he should expand his repertoire by composing an opera. Hwang and Golijov teamed up for Golijov's first project. The subject of Ainadamar is the modern Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca and his political and personal involvements in the last years of his life. Hwang wrote the libretto and Golijov translated it into Spanish. The first production at the Tanglewood Music Festival in 2003 and was not very well received. Hwang and Golijov went back to the drawing board. After substantial revisions, the opera had its official World premiere with the Santa Fe Opera in 2005 featuring the world-famous singer Dawn Upshaw and the direction of Peter Sellers. The production was showered with praise. The original recording won a Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording of 2006 and the piece has a guaranteed spot in the repertoire of American opera.

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Hwang's work for the music-theatre has also spread into the world of the Broadway musical. In the late nineties, after the success of the Walt Disney Theatrical Company's production of The Lion King, Hyperion Theatricals—the musicals division—decided to produce an original musical not based on an animated Disney film. Sirs Elton John and Tim Rice—the team that had successfully transformed The Lion King film and musical into smash successes—were brought in for the project. The chosen subject was the fictional story of the Nubian princess Aida. The character and story had been created by French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette. Working from Mariette's scenario, Guiseppe Verdi (a second to Puccini as the most performed opera composer) and his librettist Antonio Ghislanzoni fashioned an opera still performed and beloved the world over. Linda Woolverton, who had written the near perfect screenplay for Beauty and the Beast and had adapted it for the Broadway stage, was brought into the write the book. The musical was originally conceived as a concert for the theatre, but turned into a major musical project entitled Elaborate Lives: The Legend of Aida, taking its title from one of the prominent songs. The production was first tried out in Atlanta, Georgia. The production was riddled with problems, including a hydraulic pyramid that became the subject of the critical attacks of the show.

Disney Theatrical decided to hold off on the project. In the meantime, John produced a concept album of the material from the show and released it under the new name—simply Aida—featuring major singing talents such as Tina Turner, James Taylor, Boyz 2 Men, and LeeAnn Rhimes. "Written in the Stars" (a duet featuring Rhimes and John) actually had heavy chart success. When interest was built up from the material, the team set back to work. The Artistic Director of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago Robert Falls was brought in to mount the show for Broadway. Falls contacted Hwang to collaborate with him on re-writing the book. Eighty percent of the book was re-arranged, including major changes to the plotting. Rice also re-wrote some lyrics.

Aida opened on Broadway in 2000 to mostly lukewarm reviews. Ben Brantley in the New York Times was particularly scathing. But, Aida surpassed the critics' rants and ended up running for well over one thousand performances, becoming one of the long-running Broadway musicals. The score won the Tony Award and several national and international tours were successful.

Perhaps the weakest aspect of the libretto is the vague and listless lyrics, but much of the dialogue was well-handled depending on the actors involved. Heather Headley, the star of The Lion King, played Aida, Adam Pascal (from the original cast of Rent) played Radames, and the lovely Sherie Rene Scott played Amneris. The cast was the one thing critics did agree on, heaping on many bravas. Aida was a major hit, but Hwang's more prestigious work for the musical theatre was, oddly enough, a collaboration with Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Flower Drum Song has long been admired from afar as the best of the second-tier R & H works (Allegro, Pipe Dream, etc.) from the golden age of the musical theatre. It was a risky adaptation of C. Y. Lee's classic Chinese-American novel The Flower Drum Song, which focused on a love triangle and generational conflict among a Chinese family living in San Francisco. The novel was America's first glimpse into the world of Chinatown and was on the New York Times best-seller list for weeks. Hollywood tried to tag the novel for a while, but it was theatre producer Joseph Fields who snagged the rights and suggested the project to Oscar Hammerstein, II.

Hammerstein was no stranger to portraying ethnic groups in the theatre. It is sometimes hard to remember South Pacific had been a daring show to hit the Broadway stage. Many tried to have "You Have to Be Carefully Taught" excised from the show, but to no avail. R & H gave a go-ahead on the project and they would be responsible for an important first in the professional theatre. Flower Drum Song was the first show to have a mostly all Asian descent cast. With the exception of comic actor Larry Blyden and R & H favorite Juanita Hall, everyone else was from Asian ancestry.

With a libretto by Hammerstein and Fields and under the direction of Hollywood legend Gene Kelly, Flower Drum Song opened on Broadway in 1958 and proved a solid hit, running for over six hundred performances. In 1961, Universal Pictures released a film version, with a screenplay by Fields. The original libretto for the stage show was filled with puns and vaudeville sketch-like pastiches—mostly second-rate compared to the lyrics, which are among Hammerstein's best. But, Fields corrected this with the screenplay, which re-figured many of the musical numbers and straightened out the plot concoctions. The film was also a success and would be Flower Drum Song's only marshal into the new millennium as reviving a show with so many Asian-American actors seemed an impossibility to many.

Watching the 1996 Broadway revival of The King and I, Hwang was inspired to re-think Flower Drum Song. The musical had become a dusty relic that simply purported many stereotypes in the Asian-American community. But, Hwang wondered if the same modern-day staging of The King and I could be applied to the relic, which he had admitted was a guilty pleasure for him and many of Asian descent.

Hwang approached the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization with the idea of throwing out everything in the show except character names and songs and re-writing the book for Flower Drum Song. To the shock of many, the Organization accepted—most likely due to the lack of interest in the show in the post-Civil Rights era. The Organization put Hwang together with choreographer Robert Longbottom, who was looking to make his debut as director. Hwang's original take was un-libretto like and the R & H people helped guide Hwang through the process of libretti writing. The product that emerged was a book that seemed like it could've been written with Rodgers and Hammerstein's blessing but was also wised-up and thought-provoking. More than anything, the libretto glistened with pride in Asian America. It was not the P. C.-riddled piece that many critics were anticipating from the guy who wrote FOB.

The show opened in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum in 2001 and received ecstatic reviews and a sold-out run. Broadway looked like a good possibility and, in 2002, the show moved to Broadway with Rent veteran Jose Llana, Broadway superstar Lea Salonga, and impressive newcomer Sandra Allen in the lead roles, as well as Randall Duk Kim, Jodi Long, and Alvin Ing, who had played Wang Ta in the national tour of the original Flower Drum Song. The show opened to a bevy of strong reviews. There were many critics, however, who became suddenly protective of a musical they never liked much in the first place and the New York Times review was not as kind to the new libretto. But, to the surprise of many, the American Theatre Wing nominated Hwang's book for the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical—a first for a rewrite. The show would run a little over two hundred performances, unable to make it through the winter malaise. But, Hwang's Flower Drum Song brought much more respect to a musical that many had forgotten and its book alone is one of Hwang's strongest works for the theatre.

Hwang was once again coerced by the Disney Company. Ignoring the obvious project in Mulan, their 1999 film Tarzan became the subject of the newest musical offering. Scenic Designer Bob Crowley, who had designed Aida, was looking for his directing debut and the Disney Company picked their last big hit, which was oddly enough the first Disney film in many years to not feature a musical theatre-style score. The result was an authentic and original soundtrack with original songs by former Genesis front-man Phil Collins. The film Tarzan was a big hit and did introduce the art of third-dimensional canvas to animation.

The original conceit of a stage version was to be a performed on a ship and tour the East Coast. But, this was dropped when Broadway seemed to beckon. Hwang, as always, was intrigued at the idea of two very different cultures colliding and went back to the original source—Edgar Rice Burrough's novel Tarzan of the Apes. Collins wrote many new songs for the show and the musical opened in 2006 to mixed reviews. Whereas the New York Times never much liked Disney shows (excepting The Lion King), other national papers lauded the piece such as USA Today.

Hwang had established himself as a librettist as well as a playwright. Mastering the art of high opera as well as Broadway musical comedy, many of his muscles had been flexed through many different theatrical projects. But, the most elusive of his endeavors had always been applied to the screen. Having made a living writing screenplays, only a few had been produced and, while not always great successes, they all stretched Hwang's imagination to worlds he may never have discovered writing for the theatre.

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Once you have proven yourself on Broadway, Hollywood comes knocking eventually. Sometimes, the results are happy ones. David Mamet to this day enjoys duel success in both mediums, having been nominated for an Oscar for The Verdict and establishing himself as a crafty and intelligent filmmaker while other playwrights are promised the sun, moon, and stars only to be told their screenplays are too stagy and are asked to go home.

M. Butterfly had been established as an international hit for four years when Hollywood finally wanted to cash in on its success. It might've been a good idea to tell the true story of Bouriscot and Shi (which had been chronicled in Joyce Wadler's book Liaison) instead of M. Butterfly as "true stories" can often become big successes. Hwang's work was not docudrama, but, it did have the name of a big hit.

David Geffen was the main headliner for bringing the show to life as a film and while many directors were approached, it was the exciting, sex and violence-charged Canadian director David Cronenberg who accepted the position. Cronenberg was not as interested in the humorous side of the play, but in the sexual stereotyping and the global implications, including the sub-plot on Gallimard's involvement with the Vietnam War. Unlike Milos Forman's film version of Amadeus, Hwang's screenplay for the film dropped the monologue-center and flashback of the play and told the story in a linear fashion with scenes of stripped-down dialogue and subtle characterization. Whether or not this was a good choice as a screen adaptation, it did show us the other parts of the play's world providing delicious scenes of Gallimard's office affairs, the approaching Vietnam conflict, and Mao's reign taking over China.

Jeremy Irons would play the role of Gallimard and original Hwang collaborator John Lone would play the part of Song Liling. The film opened in 1993 unfortunately after The Crying Game and was viewed in the world of Hollywood as a movie capitalizing on the former film's success. Much of the criticism was directed toward Lone's performance, which is often stilted and unconvincing. Irons received his normal praise, but Gallimard is meant to be a klutz, somewhat of a buffoon, and Irons came off—as usual—sexy and smart.

From the perspective of Hollywood, M. Butterfly answered none of the questions people were interested in. Hwang's intellectual idea of Gallimard finding his "butterfly" was just that—an intellectual idea, best suited to the stage. This was echoed in a negative review from the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Roger Ebert.

Hwang had also been developing an original screenplay for Samuel Goldwyn Pictures. Red Angel was to tell the story of Chinatown in the fifties through the seventies tracking Communist witch hunts. The story became Golden Gate and it concerned a 1950's G-Man who is instrumental in placing a Chinese Laundromat owner in prison for sending money to China (thought to be for the Communist party). When released, the FBI agent tries to track down the Chinese man to apologize for the error of his ways, but the Chinese man curses the agent and it becomes the agent's prerogative to take care of the man's haunting daughter. The final act of the story featured the budding Asian-American consciousness of Hwang's youth as the daughter becomes involved with a college campus protest and more Communist allegations attack the group as the FBI man's world collapses.

The project was picked up by director John Madden, who would go on to direct the Academy Award-winning film Shakespeare in Love and the main cast featured star Matt Dillon, former model and future director Joan Chen, and the late comic actor Bruno Kirby. The result was, unfortunately, a resounding failure. The film opened in 1994 to scathing attacks. Janet Maslin of the New York Times summed up the problem of the film, asserting that Hwang had written a play instead of a screenplay. Still, there were other reviews that favorably accepted the project. It would be many years before one of Hwang's screen projects would lift off the ground. But, that project would, in fact, be one of his earliest.

The Booker Prize-winning novel Possession did not seem like a prime target for film adaptation with its long passages of Victorian-style prose and poetry, but the central story of the possession of letters between two tortured poets smelled of success in Tinsel Town. Hwang was chosen to adapt the book and did a superlative job in a very faithful rendering. Sydney Pollack, who had directed Out of Africa, was the chosen director for the project, but it never got off the ground. Possession spent years in Development Hell before another important American playwright—Neil LaBute—was chosen to direct the film. While retaining many of Hwang's historical scenes, LaBute and Australian screenwriter Laura Jones (Angela's Ashes) re-worked the contemporary scenes.

The result was a film that was considered one of LaBute's greatest successes. The film premiered in 2002 to mostly good reviews. The movie features terrific performances from leads Aaron Eckhart (In the Company of Men) and Academy Award-winner Gwyneth Paltrow as well as stirring work from Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle. Though a mixed bag, Hwang's contributions to the film industry had resulted in praise, particularly from the stars who brought his work to life.

Hwang's most recent self-written project for film was a small screen effort. Hallmark Entertainment, which has led the primetime television film industry with more quality than most, approached Hwang about an adaptation of the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West. Hwang accepted the idea and wrote the teleplay The Monkey King for a four-hour miniseries in which the Scholar from Above comes back to save the world with the help of the Monkey King and other favorite characters from the novel. When delivered, however, the powers-that-be felt that the lead character should be changed to accommodate a Caucasian star to headline the project.

Hwang reluctantly conceded and re-fashioned the plot to accommodate a white scholar of China who becomes unwittingly the Scholar from Above. Although highly criticized in the Asian American community for this move, the project—re-fashioned as The Lost Empire—premiered on NBC in 2001. The director was special effects wizard Peter MacDonald the cast featured Dharma and Greg star Thomas Gibson and respected Asian actors Russell Wong, Ling Bai, and Randall Duk Kim in lead roles. Though praised highly for its special effects and martial arts choreography, the movie was heavily criticized for its performances and direction.

There were supporters of the technical achievements of the project and the mini-series was highly rated. Although the effects come off cheesily, Hwang's teleplay does move solidly in terms of action and The Lost Empire exists as another example of Hwang's versatility. Film, television, opera, the musical theatre, and the non-musical theatre have all benefited from his talent and craft.

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David Henry Hwang is a writer who always challenges the viewer of his material. He opened the eyes of many to the struggles and mysteries of Asian America. Though he never much liked the hype from his hyphenated status, he has stood as a respected figure in the Asian community for his works that explore diversity and harmony among all peoples of this experimental country. In fact, the East West Players christened their most recently built main-stage the David Henry Hwang theatre.

Hwang's career is one unlikely to be duplicated. His vision propelled him to the limelight and, in a lofty and important place among contemporary dramatists, he has worked consistently and quietly in an ever changing and hectic world. His best work is more than likely, still to come—even if another M. Butterfly does not. Talent, grace, and humanity will all be synonymous with his name in the community of the World Drama.

Note: This profile was composed in 2007. Since then, Hwang debuted a new full-length play, Yellow Face, which centers on the controversy of Face Value. The play won an Obie Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Hwang is at work on another screenplay and musical and has contributed to two operas—Unsuk Chin's Alice in Wonderland (co-writer, libretto) and Howard Shore's The Fly (librettist).