For this final week of May, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, I conclude celebrating my mentor and teacher David Henry Hwang and his impressive body of work. This week, I’ll take a look at his adventures in both film and television.
I first published a long-form version of this profile in my collection Everyone Else is Wrong (And You Know It).
David Henry Hwang is a playwright, screenwriter, and librettist from Los Angeles, California. He wrote the screenplays for the films Possession (co-written with Laura Jones and Neil LaBute, based upon the novel by A. S. Byatt), Golden Gate, and M. Butterfly (based upon his play). He also wrote the television mini-series The Lost Empire, the television film Blind Alleys (with Frederic Kimball), and was a writer-producer on the series The Affair. In addition, he contributed story material for the television film Forbidden Nights (written by Tristine Rainer, based on the article “The Rocky Course of Love in China” by Judith Shapiro). His screenwork includes writing for two PBS anthology series: for POV, he wrote the documentary Homes Apart: Korea and, for Alive from Off-Center, he wrote Dances in Exile (film by Howard Silver, choreography by Ruby Shang). He served as script advisor on the films White Frog and Picture Bride. He was educated at the Yale School of Drama and Stanford University. He lives in New York City.
Once you have proven yourself on Broadway, Hollywood eventually comes knocking. Sometimes, the results are happy ones. David Mamet enjoyed dual success in both mediums, having been nominated for an Oscar for The Verdict and establishing himself as a crafty and intelligent filmmaker while other playwrights are promised the sun, moon, and stars only to be told their screenplays are too stagy and are asked to go home.
M. Butterfly had been established as an international hit for four years when Hollywood attempted to cash in on its success. It might’ve been a better idea to tell the true story of Bernard Bouriscot and Shi Pei Pu (which had been chronicled in Joyce Wadler’s book Liaison) instead of M. Butterfly. Films based on true stories are often big successes, but Hwang’s work was not that sort of docudrama; however it was a valuable property.
David Geffen, a co-producer on the original Broadway production, was the main headliner for bringing the play to life as a film and, while many directors were approached, it was the remarkable Canadian director David Cronenberg (who became a household name through his forays into the body horror genre) who accepted the post. Cronenberg was not as interested in the humorous side of the play, but in the sexual stereotyping and the global implications of the play, including the subplot of Gallimard’s involvement as an intelligence-gatherer on American involvement in the Vietnam War. Unlike Miloš Forman’s film version of Amadeus (which could have served as an appropriate template for adaptation), Cronenberg’s film dropped the essential monologues and the flashback structure and told the story in a linear fashion with scenes of stripped-down dialogue and (perhaps too-) subtle characterization. Whether or not this was a good choice as a screen adaptation, it did show us other parts of the world of the play, providing delicious scenes of Gallimard’s office affairs, the approaching Vietnam conflict, and the ever-devolving Chairman Mao’s reigning-in of China in the 1960s.
Jeremy Irons would play the role of Gallimard and an early Hwang collaborator, John Lone, would play the part of Song Liling. The film opened in 1993 unfortunately after the similarly-plotted The Crying Game and was viewed as a lesser movie capitalizing on the former film’s success. Much of the criticism was directed toward Lone’s performance, which, one must admit, is often stilted and unconvincing. Irons received his usual praise, but the role of Rene Gallimard is meant to be a klutz, somewhat of a buffoon, and Irons came off—as usual—sexy and dashing.
From the perspective of the face-value-reading Tinseltown, the film of M. Butterfly answered none of the questions people were fundamentally interested in. Hwang’s intellectual and symbolic idea of Gallimard finding his “butterfly” was just that—an intellectual idea. Such ideas are almost always best suited for the stage. Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Roger Ebert summed up the overall reaction in his **1/2 review: “The central question of the Gallimard case—‘Why didn’t he realize that this was a man?’—was somehow sidestepped in Hwang’s stage play, freeing it to move on to his other issues. But it was never answered in the courtroom, and now it is not answered in the movie, either. And without that answer, there is no story.”
Around the same time, Hwang had also been developing an original screenplay for Samuel Goldwyn Pictures. Red Angel was to tell the story of Chinatown during the period of the fifties through the seventies, tracking Communist witch hunts and their devastating effect on the Asian American community. The film became titled Golden Gate, and it concerned a 1950s G-Man who is instrumental in placing a Chinese laundromat owner in prison for sending money to China (the money thought to be for the Communist party when, in reality, was being sent to support his family). When the Chinese prisoner is released, the FBI agent tries to track him down to apologize for the error of his ways, but the Chinese man curses him and commits suicide. It becomes the agent’s prerogative to take care of the man’s haunted daughter. The final act of the story featured scenes of the budding Asian American consciousness of Hwang’s youth as the daughter becomes involved with college campus protests. Eventually, the FBI man’s world collapses.
The project was directed by John Madden, who would go on to direct the Academy Award-winning film Shakespeare in Love, and the cast featured the Oscar-nominated Matt Dillon, former model and future director Joan Chen, and the late character actor Bruno Kirby. The result was, unfortunately, a commercial failure. The film opened in 1994 to scathing attacks. Janet Maslin of the New York Times summed up one perceived problem of the film: “Mr. Hwang has written a play, not a screenplay. Golden Gate winds up offering a stark illustration of why the two forms are different. These scenes, as written, call for plain, abrupt staging that would give the dialogue an abstract power. The words need to be heard in sharp relief from the characters themselves, who are symbolic constructs as much as they are people anyway. The author's dramatic devices, as when one person seems to speak directly to another's thoughts, call for streamlined direction. So do certain staccato scenes so intense that they need to be set off by theatrical blackouts, not by ordinary screen editing.” Still, there were other reviews that favorably accepted the project. The Houston Post gave the “tale of mystery, intrigue and revenge” a positive review and the St. Louis Post Dispatch complimented the “first-rate actors.” It would be many years before one of Hwang’s screen projects would lift off the ground. But, that project would, in fact, be one of his earliest.
The Booker Prize-winning novel Possession, written by the incomparable A. S. Byatt, did not seem like a prime target for film adaptation with its long passages of Victorian poetry and massive length, but the central story of two academic’s possession of letters written by two tortured Victorian poets languished in development Hell for years. Hwang was originally chosen to adapt the book and did a superlative job in a faithful rendering. Sydney Pollack, who had directed Out of Africa, was the chosen director for the project, but it never got off the ground. It would be more than a decade before Possession was greenlit, the final director being another important American playwright—Neil LaBute. While retaining Hwang’s historical scenes, LaBute and Australian screenwriter Laura Jones (Angela’s Ashes) rewrote the contemporary scenes.
The result was a film that was considered one of LaBute’s greatest successes with audiences. The film premiered in 2002 to good reviews. The movie features terrific performances from leads Aaron Eckhart (In the Company of Men) and Academy Award-winner Gwyneth Paltrow as well as stirring work from Brits Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle. Ebert praised the “brainy romance” with a ***1/2 review and Byatt was also impressed with the adaptation. Though overall a mixed bag, Hwang’s contributions to the film industry have resulted in praise, particularly from the stars who brought his work to life. Hwang has continued to work for film, serving as a script advisor on Quentin Lee’s White Frog (wherein Hwang also played a small role) and Kayo Hatta’s Picture Bride. Currently, Hwang is the chosen screenwriter for Disney’s live-action remake of its adaptation of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
*****
But Hwang’s first foray into writing for the camera came much earlier than any of his films. After the success of his first five plays at the Public Theater, Hwang wrote a television film, Blind Alleys, for Boston’s WCVB-TV as a part of Metromedia Playhouse (Metromedia was a large owner of radio and television channels, and a remnant of one of the original television networks, the DuMont Broadcasting Corporation). Hwang’s teleplay was another foray into his work that explored characters outside of his Chinese American heritage.
The story of an estranged interracial couple, played by Noriyuki “Pat” Morita and Cloris Leachman, Blind Alleys (named as such because their daughter is planning a wedding in a bowling alley co-owned by Leachman), concerns Leachman’s attempts at convincing Morita’s character to walk their daughter down the aisle for her upcoming nuptials. Hwang’s first experience writing for the screen was fraught with problems. Either unsure of the young writer’s talent, or through willful prejudice, one of the actors on the film, Frederic Kimball, was brought in to “co-write” the project with Hwang. Hwang recalled later that, for whatever reason, Morita was cordial to the Caucasian writer but dismissive of the writer of Asian ancestry.
Co-directed by Bill Cosel and David Wheeler, Blind Alleys was shown in June of 1984. Writing in the Chicago Tribune, Jon Anderson called the piece “well-carpented,” featuring “all the major elements of a community theater classic: laughs, tears, romance, [and] a meaningful message.” But the experience left a bad taste in Hwang’s mouth and Blind Alleys today exists in that strange place of lost media, save for a TV advertisement that can be found on Youtube (the link above).
In 1979, American academic Judith Shapiro wrote of her experiences working as a teacher in China and falling in love with one of her students. The article was “The Rocky Course of Love in China” and appeared in The New York Times Magazine. In 1990, Hwang contributed story material for a television film based on the article, Forbidden Nights. The resulting film had a teleplay written by Tristine Rainer and starred Melissa Gilbert and Victor Wong under the direction of Waris Hussein.
The next TV project Hwang worked on was Howard Silver’s dance film entitled Dances in Exile, with a text by Hwang and choreography by Ruby Shang, that premiered as part of the avant-garde anthology series Alive from Off Center in 1991 on PBS. Reuniting with B. D. Wong, the piece is a free-flowing meditation on belonging and thankfully can be found online through Vimeo.
The same year, Hwang served as the writer for the lauded documentary Homes Apart: Korea, a devastating look at the fractured families caught up in the endless conflicts between North and South Korea. Directed by Christine Choy and J. T. Takagi, the one-hour documentary was the first film given permission to shoot in both Koreas. It premiered on PBS’ POV. Roy Richard Grinker, writing in Asian Educational Media Services News and Reviews described it as “a moving account of the ongoing tragedy of families separated since the Korean national division.” The film was given a Special Jury Award from the San Francisco International Film Festival.
Hwang’s next experience on television would be another filled with painful compromises. In the early aughts, Hwang was solicited by Hallmark Entertainment, known for its large-scale epic mini-series (Merlin, Gulliver’s Travels), to write an adaptation of the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West. Hwang wrote the teleplay The Monkey King, a four-hour miniseries in which the Scholar from Above comes back to save the world with the help of favorite characters from the novel. When delivered, however, the powers-that-be felt that the lead character should be changed to accommodate a Caucasian star to headline the project.
Hwang reluctantly conceded and re-fashioned the plot to accommodate an American scholar of China who unwittingly becomes the Scholar from Above. Although highly criticized in the Asian American community for this move, the project—re-fashioned as The Lost Empire—premiered on NBC in 2001. The director was special effects wizard Peter MacDonald; the cast featured Dharma and Greg star Thomas Gibson and Russell Wong, Ling Bai, and Randall Duk Kim in the other leading roles. Though praised by some for its special effects and martial arts choreography, the movie was heavily criticized for its performances and direction.
Julie Salamon in the New York Times wrote, “Built from a script by the playwright David Henry Hwang, the production is wildly uneven. While a great deal of care has gone into the vivid pageantry and the mythical detail, the plot keeps getting fumbled. You may start feeling that it isn't the empire that's been lost, but the story.” Still, there were supporters, People magazine calling it “an impressive spectacle.” Although the effects, compared to our current standards, come off as cheesy, Hwang’s teleplay moves solidly in terms of action and The Lost Empire exists as another example of Hwang’s versatility. Kathryn Wesley adapted Hwang’s teleplay into a paperback novelization entitled The Monkey King.
In recent years, Hwang’s credibility in television has had a significant boost. Running from 2014 to 2019, Showtime’s series The Affair (starring the magnanimous actress Ruth Wilson) became a Golden Globe-winning series exploring extramarital affairs through both female and male perspectives. Hwang served as a consulting producer on thirty-nine of the episodes, four of which he penned from seasons two through four.
*****
Hwang’s career is one unlikely to be duplicated. His vision and talent propelled him to the limelight, and he holds a lofty and important place among contemporary dramatists. Working consistently in an ever changing and hectic world, his best work is, more than likely, still to come. Talent, grace, and humanity will all be synonymous with his name in the community of world drama.
M. Butterfly, in both the 1988 and 2017 versions, is available from Plume. Chinglish, Yellow Face, his revision of Flower Drum Song, and Golden Child are available from Theatre Communications Group. 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof was published with photographs from the original production by Peregrine Smith. Acting editions of all his plays are available from Dramatists Play Service and Playscripts, Inc., which publishes Tibet through the Red Box, Peer Gynt, and Rich Relations.
Hwang’s work can be found in the anthologies 2007: The Best Ten-Minute Plays for Three or More Actors, 2004: The Best Ten-Minute Plays for Two Actors, Humana Festival 1999: The Complete Plays, Trying to Find Chinatown: The Selected Plays, FOB and Other Plays, Between Worlds: Contemporary Asian-American Plays, and Broken Promises: Four Plays among many others.
His writing can also be found in On a Bed of Rice: An Asian American Erotic Feast and Audition Monologs for Student Actors (including Hwang's monologue "Sunday Sermon") and he has contributed forewords, introductions, and other texts to The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, C. Y. Lee’s The Flower Drum Song, Greg Pak's Robot Stories and More Screenplays, Asian American Drama: 9 Plays from the Multiethnic Landscape, and Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution. In addition, he served as a translation adaptor for Mui Ngam Chong’s play Murder in San Jose. Unfinished plays include Odysseus on 43rd Street (for the Lark Play Development Centre) and Hushed Tones (for the America: Now and Here Tour). Hwang also contributed a libretto to Lucia Hwong's Venus Voodoo for the Lincoln Center.
His credits as a media producer include AAPI Rising: An AAPI Heritage Month Celebration, DNC AAPI Lunar New Year Celebration, Yellow Face (Youtube adaptation), and The Lost Empire (co-producer). He was a consulting producer for The Affair and an executive producer on White Frog and M. Butterfly (film).
He has appeared as himself in AAPI Rising: An AAPI Heritage Month Celebration, The Kennedy Center at 50, DNC AAPI Caucus Heritage Month Celebration, Stars in the House, DNC AAPI Lunar New Year Celebration, AAPI Salute to the DNC, Give My Regards to Broadway, On Broadway, Daughter of Shanghai, Theater Talk, Working in the Theatre, Joe Papp in Five Acts, Invitation to World Literature, American Masters, Long Story Short, Hollywood Chinese, special features for the DVD release of Flower Drum Song (film), Happy Birthday Oscar Wilde, Charlie Rose, Literary Visions, Maxine Hong Kingston: Talking Story, and in the Greg Pak-directed comedy short Asian Pride Porn.
There are also three books about Hwang’s work: Esther Kim Lee’s The Theatre of David Henry Hwang, William C. Boles’ Understanding David Henry Hwang, and Douglas Street’s David Henry Hwang as part of Boise State University’s Western Writers Series. Boles later established the David Henry Hwang Society, dedicated to the study of his plays.
A professor at Columbia University School of the Arts, Hwang is a Trustee of the American Theatre Wing, where he served as Chair, and sits on the Council of the Dramatists Guild.
Inductions include the Lucille Lortel Playwrights’ Sidewalk, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Theater Hall of Fame. Fellowships/grants have come from the Ford Foundation Art of Change, United States Artists, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts.
Awards include the 2015 ISPA Distinguished Artist Award, the Doris Duke Artist Award, the Steinberg Distinguished Playwriting Award, the China Institute Blue Cloud Award, the Asia Society Cultural Achievement Award, the William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in the American Theatre, the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a Grand Master of American Theatre, in addition to honors from the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Association for Asian Pacific American Artists, the Museum of Chinese in the Americas, the Organization of Chinese Americans, the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, the Center for Migration Studies, and the Asian American Resource Workshop.
He holds honorary degrees from Columbia College Chicago, the American Conservatory Theater, Lehigh University, the University of Southern California, and the State University of New York at Purchase.
In 1998, East West Players christened its new mainstage the David Henry Hwang Theatre. From 1994 to 2001, he served by appointment of Bill Clinton to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities.
He lives in New York with his wife, actress Kathryn Layng, with whom they have had two children. Visit his website to learn more.
Comments