"Making His Muscles Work For Himself": An Interview with David Henry Hwang - Asian-American playwright

Literary Review, Wntr, 1999 by Bonnie Lyons

So the big change with the new play is that it's an ensemble piece?

I think there are four good female roles and one strong male role and that the characters are more developed than in my earlier plays. About four or five years ago I decided that I had developed my ability to write plays with interesting structures and interesting ideas but that I hadn't paid enough attention to the detail that gives characters full human richness. So with this play I consciously set out to be more Chekhovian.

Years ago you said, "I'm not interested in subtext or subtleties. I'm more interested in creating layers of a structure that have reverberations, one upon the other." Is your new play a kind of repudiation of that earlier position?

Yes, I'm trying to make up for what I now perceive as a certain deficiency in my work. I want to continue to grow as a writer, and character complexity is the area I have consciously been focusing on.

Elsewhere you've said that "except for a little more equal opportunities in theater" you were "loath to set out an aesthetic or political agenda" for other people. Do you have an aesthetic or political agenda for yourself?

Because I work with Asian themes and material I've become involved in various cultural debates like the Miss Saigon controversy that you can call a debate over multiculturalism or political correctness, depending on how you look at it. I think I've probably become an old-fashioned 60s integrationist. I've become rather antinationalistic and antiseparatist in my middle age. I'm in a mixed marriage and I have a biracial child. In my earlier years I agreed with the nationalistic argument that one shouldn't be assimilated, that it is pathetic to try to mimic the white man. At this point in my life I would say that the argument against assimilation wrongly assumes that culture is static. It doesn't make any sense to me; culture is what people create at any given time, culture lives and changes. So I think it's accurate to say that while society is going to change me, I am also going to change society. In a model of dynamic assimilation we're constantly moving to create culture, and this I think essentially has been the history of America with the exception of certain groups that have not been included. To expand on the model of dynamic assimilation and to include all the excluded groups is perhaps my personal political agenda these days.

Your own political thinking has gone through three stages: an early, unquestioning assimilationist position, then a stage of isolationism and nationalism, and now your current thinking about dynamic assimilation. Do you think young writers have to repeat the same three stages?

People are always going to have to work through issues, the question is what they have to work through. And that has a lot to do with the particular context of your time. When I was in college it was the birth of the isolationist/nationalist period, and that was the car I got into to begin this journey. Nowadays it seems to me college-age people recognize the importance of race but also see that it is not the whole picture. That seems to me to be a different place from which to start than it was in the 70s.