Content area
Full Text
Raised in a wealthy Los Angeles suburb by a first generation, Chinese American fundamentalist Christian family, David Henry Hwang wrote and directed his first play, F.O.B. (slang for "fresh off the boat"), which explores the tensions within and between recent and assimilated Chinese immigrants. F.O.B. won an Obie when it moved to New York in 1980 and since then many of Hwang's plays, including The Dance of the Railroad (1981), Family Devotions (1981), The Sound of a Voice (1983), The House of Sleeping Beauties (1983), Rich Relations (1986), M. Butterfly (1988), and Bondage (1992), have addressed issues of individual identity, group identity, and as he explains in this interview, fluidity of identity. Hwang's most famous play, his Tony Award-winning M. Butterfly, exposes Western attitudes toward Asia by deconstructing one of the most powerful and seductive images of the Orient, Puccini's opera, Madame Butterfly. Far more than contributions to ethnic theater, Hwang's plays provide brilliant and complex analyses of the politics of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The following interview took place on September 7, 1996, a few months before his most recent play, Golden Child, opened in New York.
BL: You've written in many styles and many kinds of plays. Do you see anything linking all your work? What about the issue of identity? Autonomy and community?
DHH: It's probably true that all my work in some sense confronts the issue of fluidity of identity and explores the idea that who we are is the result of circumstance, the result of things that are not necessarily inherent but instead come out of our interaction with our contacts. Many of the plays suggest that if the contact changes, the individual becomes a different person, so to speak. Much of my work is about Asian-Americans, but even in the plays that aren't, you can trace that theme of fluidity of identity. The notion of community vs. the individual is interesting; it's not an idea I've really thought of before in relation to my work. As an Asian-American whose parents are immigrants, one of the dilemmas I feel most strongly in my own life is trying to figure out that issue. I was raised with a mentality that was concerned with group identity and about doing things for...