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

Literary Review, Wntr, 1999 by Bonnie Lyons

Years ago you said that the most exciting professional moment of your life was when you got the call from the O'Neill Theater saying they wanted to put on F.O.B.. Did the day M. Butterfly won the Tony and One Thousand Airplanes had its first trial performance surpass that?

That was a big day! But the thing that is so striking about the O'Neill acceptance is that the hardest thing is to get your foot in the door. Once you do that, you may or may not get a Tony, but all things are possible. And nothing is possible until the door is open. Moreover, the O'Neill acceptance was a huge surprise, because so many plays are submitted and so few are chosen, whereas with the Tony there are only five nominees, so I had a 20% chance.

Can you talk about your work on the film version of M. Butterfly?

I tried to find cinematic equivalents for the stage devices, but none of that made it into the actual movie. The movie is simply naturalistic.

Was that a great disappointment?

As a playwright I'm used to having my words be somewhat sacrosanct, but what happened with the film was pretty typical for a screenwriter. Whether the film would have been more successful if the director had followed my suggestions, who knows?

Can you talk about the influence of Maxine Hong Kingston and Woman Warrior on you and your work?

It was reading Woman Warrior that made me feel that I could find my own voice. As an Asian-American, she was the first author who spoke in a voice that seemed special, directly related to me. Before reading her work, I didn't think it was possible to write about my own parochial concerns; they didn't seem to have a place in literature as such. I really credit her with enabling me to believe my own concerns could be made into literature.

More than many playwrights, you've incorporated music and dance into your work. Are you still interested in total theater?

I am definitely still interested, but right now with Golden Child I set myself the challenge of trying to move an audience just with my words. I grew up with a kind of disdain for naturalism and kitchen sink plays, but seeing The Heiress was a real revelation to me. Golden Child has a slightly odd bookend structure and there's doubling in the play, but basically the body of it is a fairly naturalistic play set in China in 1923.

Early in your career you seemed interested in the importance of holding on to one's cultural traditions but of late you seem concerned with the idea that traditional societies were based on political and social ideas that are not attractive to you. Do you think you feel a conflict between honoring the past and progressive ideas?

That's one of the things Golden Child is about in fact--how to interact with the past in such a way as to make it useful to us now. Neither ignoring the past nor idealizing the past is useful in trying to better oneself or one's society. And how can we look at the past realistically since we don't know what really happened. We can only try to interpret the past through the filter of our current perspective. In Golden Child family history functions in the same way as scripture, or mythology, or literature. It's only important as it is able to be interactive and reinterpreted by people who are alive. That's the way the ghosts of the past serve us.