David Henry Hwang

David Henry Hwang’s prolific and varied career has helped to reshape the perception of Asian Americans on Broadway and in mainstream American theatre. Works like M. Butterfly and Soft Power reinterpret canonical theatrical works such as Madame Butterfly and The King and I, allowing Hwang to explore and deconstruct the Asian stereotypes that have long been present in American pop culture. Hwang has won and been nominated for numerous prestigious awards and continues writing and teaching today.

David Henry Hwang’s Biography

David Henry Hwang was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1957. His parents were immigrants; his father was from China, and his mother was of Chinese descent but raised in the Philippines. They met in the United States after immigrating and had three children, of which Hwang was the eldest and the only boy.

From a young age, Hwang was exposed to theatre and performance. His mother was a concert pianist and played in the orchestra on productions at the renowned Asian American theatre East West Players in Los Angeles. Therefore, as a boy, Hwang had the experience of seeing other Asian Americans working in theatre and the arts, which profoundly affected him.

After finishing high school, Hwang earned his bachelor’s degree from Stanford University, graduating in 1979. While he was a student, Hwang wrote his first play, FOB (1979), which was produced the year he graduated. FOB was an acronym for “fresh off the boat,” a saying used to refer to recently arrived immigrants and examined the experience of Asian American immigrants in the contemporary United States.

After the play was produced at Stanford, it was developed for production at the Off-Broadway Joseph Papp Public Theatre, where it premiered in 1980 and won an Obie Award.

Hwang studied for a year at Yale School of Drama.

From 1980 to 1981, Hwang continued to study at Yale School of Drama, where he hoped to learn more about theatre history. He left, however, because his playwriting career was beginning to take off.

The Joseph Papp Public Theatre produced Hwang’s next two plays, The Dance and the Railroad and Family Devotions, both in 1981. These two plays continued to explore Chinese American and Asian American themes, creating a kind of Chinese American trilogy with FOB.

Throughout the 1980s, Hwang became known as a successful playwright. He began working on film and television projects, including co-writing the script for the tv movie Blind Alleys in 1985.

In 1988, Hwang’s best-known work and first Broadway success, M. Butterfly, premiered. M. Butterfly, a play on the classic opera, Madame Butterfly, won numerous awards, including the Tony Award for Best Play and the Drama Desk Award. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Following the success of M. Butterfly, Hwang worked on a diverse array of projects, including drama, film, opera, and musical theater. He won another Obie Award and was nominated for another Tony for the play Golden Child in 1997 and 1998.

At the start of the 2000s, Hwang successfully returned to Broadway with two different musicals. He co-wrote the book for Aida, with music and lyrics by Elton John and Tim Rice, which opened in 2000. Later, Hwang took on the rewriting of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song. The musical, which originally premiered in 1958, was based on a well-known novel of the same name by Chinese American author C. Y. Lee.

Flower Drum Song is set in San Francisco's Chinatown.

Hwang’s revival, which tells the story of a Chinese family living in San Francisco’s Chinatown, was produced in 2002 with an all-Asian cast and won Hwang his third Tony nomination.

Hwang has continued to have an incredibly prolific career, including the award-winning play Yellow Face (2007), writing the libretto for several successful operas, and working on various projects for television.

In 2014, Hwang accepted a position at the Columbia University School of Drama as an Associate Professor of Theatre in Playwriting.

David Henry Hwang’s Wife and Personal Life

In 1985, Hwang married Ophelia Chong but the two divorced in 1989. A few years later, in 1993, Hwang married actress Kathryn Layng. The couple has two children.

In 2015, Hwang was stabbed in the neck near his Brooklyn home. The attack appeared to be random, and the assailant was never caught. Although he was seriously injured, Hwang made a full recovery. A dramatized version of the incident appeared in Hwang’s 2019 musical Soft Power.

David Henry Hwang’s Plays

David Henry Hwang has written more than twenty plays, worked on the books for successful musicals, written the libretti for a handful of operas, and worked on various projects for film and television. Some of his best-known plays include FOB, M. Butterfly, and Yellow Face.

FOB (1979)

FOB was David Henry Hwang’s first play, written and produced on campus during his senior year at Stanford University. The next year, in 1980, it premiered Off-Broadway and won an Obie Award. FOB stands for “fresh off the boat” and shows the contrast between recently-arrived Chinese immigrants and Asian Americans who have lived in the United States for years.

M. Butterfly (1988)

M. Butterfly is David Henry Hwang’s best-known work. It is loosely based on the classic opera Madame Butterfly (1905) and a relationship between the French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and the male Peking opera singer Shi Pei Pu. The couple reportedly engaged in a 20-year-long relationship in which Boursicot believed that Shi Pei Pu was a woman.

M. Butterfly is David Henry Hwang's best-known work.

The play premiered on Broadway in 1988 and won several awards, including three Tony Awards and three Drama Desk Awards, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. M. Butterfly was made into a film in 1993, for which Hwang adapted the script. He also altered the script for the play’s 2017 Broadway revival, directed by Julie Taymor.

Yellow Face (2007)

Hwang described the semi-autobiographical play Yellow Face as “a kind of unreliable memoir.”¹ The main character shares the author’s name, and the play includes some incidents from Hwang’s own life and family. Yellow Face is loosely inspired by the controversial casting of the Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce in the Broadway production of Miss Saigon. Pryce was cast as an Asian main character and used makeup and prosthetics to look the part.

The play opened in Los Angles and later moved to New York, where it won an Obie Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

David Henry Hwang’s Themes

Two of the key themes in David Henry Hwang’s work are reimagining classic works of theatre and exploring the Asian American experience.

Reimagining Classics

Much of David Henry Hwang’s work has to do with retelling classic theatrical works in a way that incorporates viewpoints and experiences that are usually absent from mainstream theatre.

Hwang often explores how stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans are constructed in popular culture through his reworking of classics. Works like M. Butterfly, Flower Drum Song, and Soft Power (2019) are based on works like Madame Butterfly and The King and I, which have shaped stereotypes and the perception of Asians and Asian Americans in the United States and around the world.

Soft Power, for example, is a retelling of Rodger and Hammerstein’s musical The King and I, which tells the story of a British woman who travels to Bangkok to become the governess of the King of Siam’s children, and the two fall in love. Hwang’s reinterpretation involves a Chinese man that moves to the United States, where he falls in love with Hillary Clinton.

The Asian American Experience

Much of Hwang’s work explores the experiences of Asian American characters. Plays like FOB, Family Devotions, and Yellow Face illustrate conflicts within Asian American families and even draw on some of Hwang’s real-life experiences. Hwang was one of the first playwrights to bring a Chinese American perspective to Broadway and mainstream theatre, exploring issues such as immigration, assimilation, and the struggle for identity.

David Henry Hwang’s Awards

David Henry Hwang has won and been nominated for numerous awards and fellowships. They include:

• Three Obie Awards for FOB, Golden Child, and Yellow Face
• Three Tony Award nominations with one win for Best Play for M. Butterfly
• Three Pulitzer Prize nominations
• Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and more
• Honorary degrees from the University of Southern California, the American Conservatory Theater, and the State University of New York at Purchase.

¹David Henry Hwang interviewed by Winyan Soo Hoo. “Bearing the ‘Yellow Face’: Q&A with David Henry Hwang.” The Washington Post. 2014.

²David Henry Hwang interviewed by Andrew R. Chow. “Playwright David Henry Hwang on Flipping a Flawed Musical on Its Head in Soft Power.” Time Magazine. 2019.