David Henry Hwang remains realistic. He even puts himself in his plays

My life in the theater

David Henry Hwang remains realistic. He even puts himself in his plays

Ahead of Yellow faceIn his Broadway debut, the Tony Award-winning playwright shares the real-life origins of some of his most famous works.

Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang has a full life. A linguistic writer, his artistic output is vast, with hundreds of works to his credit in film, television, opera, musical theater, dance, and, of course, his many, many plays. Considered the most celebrated Asian American playwright in history and the only Asian playwright to win a Tony Award, Hwang does not take his place in culture lightly.

“I was a kid who grew up without any images of people who looked like me, who seemed like real human beings,” Hwang says. “I guess I’ve spent my adult life trying to access the levers of American art and popular culture, to subvert that history and represent characters and narratives through my own prism.”

Although themes of Chinese American identity and Asian history permeate much of his work, inspiration can strike Hwang in even the most unlikely settings. Mr. Butterflywhich marked his Broadway debut, his first Tony Award win and his first Pulitzer nomination, was inspired by a vaguely sketched scandal shared at a cocktail party.

“Someone told a story about this French diplomat who had a 20-year affair with a Chinese actress, and the actress turned out to be A: a spy. And B: a man. And when the affair was revealed, the diplomat claimed he never knew his lover was a man,” Hwang says. While the scandal made headlines in France at the time, hard facts were hard to come by, especially in the pre-Internet era with no access to international journalism. A “Chronicle on page 26 of the Times,” Hwang points out.

Real history became malleable in Hwang’s hands as he crafted a sensible foundation based on whatever primary sources he could get his hands on. This ability to create effective pathos within a framework rooted in reality became one of the many motifs of Hwang’s work. From the historically grounded revision of Flower Drum Song (which reimagined the classic as an explicit commentary on Asian assimilation into American culture) to the acerbic political satire of Soft power (where Hillary Clinton was a character), Hwang speaks truth to power through his work, shedding a carefully considered light on the foundations of our modern zeitgeist.

Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in Yellow facea quasi-autobiographical play by Hwang. The play first premiered in 2007 and finally makes its long-awaited Broadway debut on September 13 at the Todd Haimes Theatre, starring Daniel Dae Kim as Hwang himself.

“It’s basically a rewriting or reconceptualization of Nominal value,” Hwang shares, referring to his comedy about mistaken racial identity that failed to find an audience in the mid-1990s. “Failure is somehow useful and necessary. Yellow face is essentially a stage mockumentary. It tells the story of a playwright, named DHH, who wrote a play called Mr. Butterflywho protests the casting of Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian pimp in Miss Saigon, and then mistakenly cast a white actor to play the Asian lead in his own play, titled Nominal value. And when DHH finds out he picked a white guy, he tries to cover it up to protect his reputation as an Asian American model, and…” Hwang smiles and shrugs. “Well, that becomes the basis of a farce.

My Life in the Theatre is filmed at Alchemical Studios in New York.