David Henry Hwang was born in Los Angeles, CA , on August 11, 1957. He
is the eldest child of Henry Yuan Hwang and Dorothy Hwang, first-generation
immigrants from China. He graduated from Stanford University in 1979 with a BA
in English. He also attended the Yale School of Drama. His literary career
focused primarily on the illustration of Asian American social and political relations
and the exploration of his Chinese heritage.
His first play entitled F.O.B. was
produced at the National Playwrights Conference in 1979, and then Joseph Papp
at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theater in 1980. As an exhaustive
depiction of the contrasts and conflicts between established Asian Americans
and new coming immigrants, it won an Obie Award for best new play. Subsequently,
Hwang wrote The Dance and the Railroad, Family Devotions, The House of Sleeping
Beauties, The Sound of a Voice, As the Crow Flies, Rich Relations. However, it
wasn’t until 1988 that he had been recognized as a major voice of the American stage.
His greatest success M. Butterfly won him a Tony Award for the Best Play of the
season and a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1989. Based on true events, it is s
story of a diplomat, a westerner, and his love for a Chinese diva who not only
turns out to be a spy for the Chinese government but also a man in disguise. The
acclaim that the play generated prompted Hwang's interests in many other ways
of theatrical expression, including work for opera, film, and the musical
theatre. He worked as a librettist, director and screenwriter. His later body
of works includes Bondage, Face Value, Trying to Find Chinatown, Bang Kok,
Golden Child, Peer Gynt (based on the play by Henrik Ibsen, co-written with
Stephan Muller), Merchandising , Jade Flowerpots and Bound Feet, Tibet Through
the Red Box, The Great Helmsman, Yellow Face, A Very DNA Reunion, and Chinglish.
Hwang has been awarded
numerous grants, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Arts, the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and the New York State
Council on the Arts. In 1998, the nation's oldest Asian American theatre
company, the East West Players, named its new main stage The David Henry Hwang
Theatre. In 2011, he received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for
Theater Award as a Grand Master of American Theater. Moreover, in 2012, he was
awarded the William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in the American
Theatre and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. Hwang holds honorary
degrees from Columbia College Chicago, the American Conservatory Theatre, and
Lehigh University. In 2012 Hwang was named a Fellow of United States Artists.
by Sylwia Chlebowska
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