Celebrating the birth & legacy of

DAVID HENRY HWANG

“The thing that makes you unique, the thing that makes you idiosyncratic, the thing that makes you weird, that’s your superpower as an artist. Because when you draw from that, you're creating the thing that only you can make...but audiences, gatekeepers, critics, respond to something that feels genuine, unique. And like the thing that only that artist could have created.”

— David Henry Hwang

David Henry Hwang is an American playwright, librettist, screenwriter, and theater professor at Columbia University in New York City. Best known for his Tony Award-winning play, M. Butterfly, Hwang is a three-time Tony nominee, has won three Obie Awards, and three of his works (M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, and Soft Power) have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Hwang was born on August 11, 1957, in Los Angeles to Henry Yuan Hwang, the founder of Far East National Bank, and Dorothy Hwang, a piano teacher. The oldest of three children, he received a Bachelor’s degree in English from Stanford University where his first play, FOB (1979) premiered. It explores the contrasts and conflicts between established Asian Americans and "Fresh Off the Boat" new immigrants. It won an Obie Award in 1980 for Best New American Play.

He attended Yale for one year during which time he penned two short plays—The Dance and the Railroad (1981, Drama Desk Award nominee), about two Chinese immigrant railroad workers and their expectations, and The House of Sleeping Beauties (1983), adapted from a short story by Japanese writer Kawabata Yasunari.

Hwang became a frequent collaborator with Philip Glass and a number of composers over the years, including Chinese-born Bright Sheng on The Silver River (1997), a one-act opera based on an ancient Chinese folktale; Argentine Osvaldo Golijov on Ainadamar (2003), an opera inspired by Spanish writer Federico García Lorca; and Korean-born Unsuk Chin on the opera Alice in Wonderland (2007; based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice books).

“I often say that the artist creates the work, but the work recreates the artist, and there’s a reciprocal relationship where I created the thing, which then changed me.”

— David Henry Hwang

In 1985, Hwang co-wrote the screenplay for Blind Alleys, a made-for-television movie starring Pat Morita and Cloris Leachman. His next work, Rich Relations (1986), was his first full-length play to feature non-Asian characters. Although the play was a critical failure, Hwang found its reception freeing in that it drove him to embrace experimentation over positive critical response.

His next drama, M. Butterfly (1988) premiered on Broadway in 1988. The play is a deconstruction of Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly, alluding to news reports of the 20th-century relationship between French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu, a male Chinese opera singer. Shi purportedly convinced Boursicot that he was a woman throughout their twenty-year relationship. The play won numerous awards for Best Play: a Tony Award (for which Hwang was the first Asian American to win), the Drama Desk Award, the John Gassner Award, and the Outer Critics Circle Award. It was the first of three of his works to become a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Hwang also wrote the screenplay for M. Butterfly which premiered in 1993. The film was directed by David Cronenberg and featured Jeremy Irons and John Lone.

In 2016, Hwang became a writer and consulting producer of the Golden Globe-winning Showtime television series The Affair.

Also in 2016, the opera Dream of the Red Chamber, co-written by Hwang and Bright Sheng and based on the 18th century Chinese novel, premiered at the San Francisco Opera.

In the spring of 2018, Hwang's Soft Power premiered at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, California. The music and additional lyrics were written by Jeanine Tesori (Violet, Caroline or Change). Its subsequent run at the Public Theatre in New York received a 2020 Grammy nomination for Best Musical Theatre Album and was a Finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

Hwang is currently an Associate Professor of Theatre in Playwriting at Columbia University. He is working on a number of projects including rewrites of Soft Power and Aida, a live action feature musical remake of Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and a film about Anna May Wong.

“Hwang’s writing veers tonally from sharp and funny to dramatic and sweeping to poetic and lyrical, but it is the emotional intricacy of his characters’ struggles — most often strangers in a strange land, unfamiliar with the language or, even more dangerously, with the language of love — that resonates after the curtain falls.” — The New York Times

“My work has always been controversial within certain segments of the Asian-American community. This is a community that is generally not represented well at all on the stage, in the media, etc. So on those few occasions when something comes along, everybody feels obligated to make sure that it represents his own point of view. And of course, no artist can do that.”

— David Henry Hwang

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