My Poem Won a Prize!

I am so excited to announce that a poem of mine, "The Rain Dance," has won 2nd Prize in Blue Institute's Words on Water Writing Contest (Adult Poetry Category).

This prize means a lot for two reasons: a) the poem includes a memory of my late father and b) this is the first poem of mine to be recognized with any award or prize. I'm truly honored and thrilled. I hope you check out Blue Institute's ecological mission and I'm including a link below to where the poem is published on their website.

Going from refused entrance to a poetry course at Bennington College to being awarded and published is truly edifying. It just goes to show you writers: keep submitting and keep believing in yourself.

Ladies and gentlemen-- "The Rain Dance"

David Henry Hwang, pt. 3: Hollywood and Beyond

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.

Irons and Lone in M. BUTTERFLY.

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.

Chen and Dillon in GOLDEN GATE.

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.

Ehle and Northam in POSSESSION.

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).

Gilbert and Robin Shou in FORBIDDEN NIGHTS.

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.

B. D. Wong in DANCES IN EXILE.

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.

Still from HOMES APART: KOREA.

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.

Ling, Gibson, and Wong in THE LOST EMPIRE.

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.

Dominic West, Maura Tierney, Joshua Jackson, and Ruth Wilson from THE AFFAIR.

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.

David Henry Hwang, pt 2: Musical Voyages

For the next two weeks, in honor of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, I continue to celebrate my mentor and teacher David Henry Hwang and his impressive body of work. This week, I’ll take a look at his work for the musical theatre and opera. Next week, his adventures in Hollywood.

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 libretti to the operas M. Butterfly (music by Huang Ruo), The Rift (music by Ruo), Circus Days and Nights (co-written with Tilde Björfors, music by Philip Glass, based on the poems by Robert Lax), Dreams of the Red Chamber (co-written with Bright Sheng, composer, based on the novel by Cao Xueqin), An American Soldier (music by Ruo), The Fly (music by Howard Shore, based on the film by David Cronenberg), Alice in Wonderland (co-written with Unsuk Chin, composer, based on the books by Lewis Carroll), Ainadamar (music by Osvaldo Golijov), The Silver River (music by Sheng), The Sound of a Voice, and The Voyage (both with music by Glass). He wrote the libretti to the musicals Soft Power (also co-lyricist with composer Jeanine Tesori), Tarzan (music and lyrics by Phil Collins, based upon the screenplay by Tab Murphy, Bob Tzudiker, and Noni White and the novel Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs), Flower Drum Song (music by Richard Rodgers; lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein, II based upon the libretto by Hammerstein and Joseph Fields and the novel The Flower Drum Song by C. Y. Lee), and Aida (co-written with Linda Woolverton and Robert Falls; music by Elton John; lyrics by Tim Rice, based upon the opera by Giuseppe Verdi and Antonio Ghislanzoni). He also wrote the texts for the music-theatre pieces Icarus at the Edge of Time (co-written with Brian Greene, music by Glass, film by AL+AL) and 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof (music by Glass) as well as texts for the dance pieces After Eros (choreography by Maureen Fleming) and Yellow Punk Dolls (choreography by Ruby Shang) plus the lyrics for the song “Solo” (co-written with Prince) for the album Come. He was educated at the Yale School of Drama and Stanford University. He lives in New York City.

The international success of M. Butterfly prompted David Henry Hwang in many different directions. He has since written for film, television, dance, musical theatre, and—most prolifically—opera. One of the audience members for 1983’s Sound and Beauty at the Public Theater was Philip Glass, who had recently completed his trilogy of portrait operas Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and Akhnaten. Now the greatest and most prolific opera composer in the world, Glass fell in love with Hwang’s one-acts which he felt he could put to music given their sparse and lyrical nature. Glass would eventually do this, but when he approached Hwang first it was for a unique project called 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof, a three-way collaboration between Hwang, Glass, and the scenic designer Jerome Sirlin.

1,000 AIRPLANES ON THE ROOF

It would be “melodrama” in the classical sense. An actor would perform a monologue in front of a set and over music (akin to Peter and the Wolf). But, in this case, the set would be made up of third-dimensional, holographic designs by Sirlin, the music would be performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble, and the monologue would tell the story of an alien abduction, a fitting further investigation into “otherness” that Hwang had expressed so brilliantly in his plays.

In some ways, Hwang’s “arias” from his plays prepared him for the solo text, which exhibits his trademark humor and poetic style, creating a work that was both haunting and funny. Sirlin’s holographic designs would be praised wherever the show traveled. 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof opened in 1988 at the Vienna International Airport, Hangar #3. Over the course of its North American tour, the central role of M. would be played by rotating actors, including Rocco Sisto and Jodi Long.

It was praised as a work that brought music-theatre hurdling toward the new millennium. Michele May, in the Potomac News, described the show as “a light show, a ballet, a spoken opera, an art exhibit, a lesson in Zen. Above all, it is a totally innovative entertainment form.” The recording (available on Virgin records) would include vocals by Linda Ronstadt. 1,000 Airplanes would establish a working relationship between Hwang and Glass that has lasted into the 21st century.

Their next work would be their most audacious. The Metropolitan Opera in New York has commissioned relatively few operas over the course of its history, but they turned to Glass for an opera in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World. Glass wrote a story treatment that would juxtapose Columbus’ discovery with a science fiction story about the future discoveries of new worlds. It would be, overall, less about Columbus and more a piece that would investigate the concept of discovery. Hwang wrote the libretto, some of which is in Latin and Spanish, based on Glass’ scenario.

THE VOYAGE

The Voyage featured a large cast, including Douglas Perry, and was originally produced in 1992 at the Met under the baton of Bruce Ferden. Edward Rothstein, in the New York Times wrote the work “has something for everybody: a mixture of comforting cliché and aggressive pretense, some bombastic insistence and some tender, lyrical music that is among Mr. Glass’ best.” It would be some time before The Voyage was recorded—in fact more than a decade later, a CD release was finally issued on the Orange Mountain Music label, based on the production at the Landestheater Linz in Austria. That production was conducted by frequent Glass collaborator Dennis Russell Davies. The Voyage is a lesser-known work by Glass, but is amusing, touching and features some of Hwang’s strongest lyrical writing.

THE SILVER RIVER

The next opera Hwang would collaborate on was a piece by the noted Chinese American composer Bright Sheng. A MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, Sheng’s repertoire had grown extensively in the last part of the twentieth century and The Silver River was to be his first theatrical piece. Based upon a classic Chinese folktale, it began as a chamber opera, but was expanded into a full-length opera in one act that had its premiere at the Spoleto Festival in 2000. In 2002, the production had its New York premiere under the direction of Ong Ken Sen, presented at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. John Von Rein, of the Chicago Tribune, wrote “Sheng and librettist David Henry Hwang have fashioned a music theater fable of great charm and imagination. The Silver River skillfully fuses eastern and western musical impulses, merging song, speech and movement, with tight percussion-laced rhythms. With a sweet simplicity, their chamber opera creates magic before our eyes.”

THE SOUND OF A VOICE

A year after the New York premiere of The Silver River, the world would see another collaboration from Hwang and Glass. Glass’ dream of setting Sound and Beauty was finally realized when Robert Woodruff, Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theater invited Glass and Hwang to write an opera for a theater instead of an opera house. Using Eastern-oriented instruments for the first time, Glass composed The Sound of a Voice, the omnibus title to two short operas. In the second half, The House of Sleeping Beauties was transformed into Hotel of Dreams, omitting references to Kawabata. The two pieces premiered in 2003 at AmRep in Boston under Woodruff’s direction, featuring nationally renowned twin singers Eugene and Herbert Perry and Wu Man, the most famous pipa player in the world, in the orchestra pit.

Unlike the original production of Sound and Beauty, Hotel of Dreams (the libretto almost word for word the script of (Sleeping Beauties) overtook the first act Sound of a Voice and became the most haunting piece of the evening. When the production moved to Pittsburgh, Mark Kenny in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review wrote the piece was “thought-provoking and emotionally powerful.” Unfortunately, there has not yet been a recording except for a suite of the music given on Glass’ Theater Music, Vol. 1 on the Orange Mountain label.

Hwang’s next operatic collaboration was with an up-and-coming contemporary classical composer who was slowly taking the musical world by storm. Osvaldo Golijov combines Eastern European and Spanish-influenced music to create a distinct style that turned out to be fitting for an opera. The subject of Ainadamar (Arabic for Fountain of Tears) is Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca and his political/personal involvements in the last years of his life. Hwang wrote the libretto and Golijov translated it into Spanish. The first production at the Tanglewood Music Festival in 2003 and was not very well received, sending Hwang and Golijov back to the drawing board.

AINADAMAR

After substantial revisions, the Santa Fe Opera showed the work in 2005 featuring the world-famous singer Dawn Upshaw and the direction of Peter Sellers. The production was showered with praise. When it moved to New York, Peter G. Davis, writing in New York magazine, called the piece “a quiet spellbinder, an astonishing demonstration of how an opera can sound completely contemporary yet still convey its message in very potent lyrical song.” The original recording won a Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording of 2006.

By this point, Hwang was a noted and sought-after opera librettist. His next project was with the South Korean composer Unsuk Chin, a protégé of György Ligeti. Combining elements of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Alice in Wonderland had a libretto that was written by both Hwang and Chin. Ligeti had long planned an opera on the subject, but when he was unable to realize his dream, Chin took up the reins.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND

The work premiered in 2007 under the auspices of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, Germany. Directed by the legendary Achim Freyer and conducted by the equally legendary Kent Nagano, Alice in Wonderland was universally praised and released on DVD. Alice was played by Sally Matthews and Dame Gwyneth Jones played the role of the Queen of Hearts.

Alex Ross in The New Yorker wrote, “Chin’s sound world is seductively cavernous, suggesting not only the magical rabbit hole down which Alice tumbles but also the psychological crevasses beneath the surface of Carroll’s writing.” The German opera magazine Opernwelt called the production the World Premiere of the Year.

The following year, Hwang collaborated for the second time with the world-class Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg (who had directed the film of M. Butterfly). Howard Shore, a longtime collaborator with Cronenberg, wrote an operatic version of The Fly, one of Cronenberg’s most commercially successful films. The film (technically a remake) was adapted from a horror story by George Langelaan. Premiering in 1986, it made Jeff Goldblum a star.

While Shore composed the music for the original film, his opera score was unrelated. The piece was commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera and the eclectic and inspiring team at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, France, where it premiered in 2008, directed by Cronenberg and conducted by tenor Plácido Domingo. A performance of the opera was broadcast on France Musique radio in late 2008.

THE FLY

On the whole, reviews were not positive. Reviewing the Los Angeles premiere later in 2008, the New York Times’ Anthony Tomsasini was critical of Shore’s operatic abilities: “Now and then the music grabs you, as in an extended love duet for Brundle and Veronica. Finally, here are captivating lyrical phrases that flow with halting, elusive restraint, cushioned by bittersweet orchestral harmonies. Mr. Shore has clear strengths as a composer and may have a good opera in him. The Fly is not it.” However, Mark R. Kelly for Locusmag wrote, “It does resemble some more adventurous film music by Shore himself, or [Elliot] Goldenthal, or the avant-garde 1960s turns by Jerry Goldsmith—spicy with dissonance, avoiding predictable turns, flirting with atonality—even as the orchestral color and phrasing provide recognizable support for the nature of the drama unfolding on stage.”

Hwang’s next project would be received more positively. The Chinese-born composer Huang Ruo, a challenging composer whose work has been performed all over the world, became another frequent collaborator with Hwang with the debut of An American Soldier in 2014. Originally a one-act opera based on the true story of the bullied Chinese American Army soldier Danny Chen, the piece was eventually developed into a full-length opera, premiering four years later by the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis at Webster University. The production was conducted by Michael Christie and featured Kathleen Kim in the role of Josephine Young, added for the expanded version.

AN AMERICAN SOLDIER

Hwang’s libretto was originally made up mostly of court transcripts but, in its expanded version, featured more of his lyrical virtuosity in arias that developed the characters further. Sarah Fenske, in her review from the Riverfront Times, acknowledged the brutal and stark nature of the piece: “Composer Huang Ruo draws inspiration from both avant-garde music and ancient and folk Chinese music, and to Western ears, it can sound dissonant and unmelodic. The cast handles it admirably, but you won't leave this one with a song in your heart. And maybe you shouldn't, no matter how much you long for that relief: This isn’t that kind of story.” Scott Cantrell, in The Dallas Morning News, wrote “This is powerful theater, with music to match.”

Hwang was solicited once again by Bright Sheng for a take on the 18th Century Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xuegin. Commissioned by the Chinese Heritage Foundation Friends of Minnesota, and premiering at the San Francisco Opera in 2016, the opera focuses on one aspect of the novel, a love triangle set amidst a family’s declining fortune.

DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER

Dream of the Red Chamber was a long-gestating project to bring one of the Four Classical Novels of Chinese literature to life. Hwang, who co-wrote the libretto with Sheng, was initially hesitant as Xuegein’s novel has over four hundred characters. Jason Victor Serinus, in Classical Voice North America wrote, “Hwang had not even read the book when Shanghai-born Sheng contacted him about collaborating on the libretto. But together with Oscar-winning, Hong Kong-born production designer Tim Yip (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and American-born Taiwanese director Stan Lai, they created a production that stuns with its beauty, elegance, and human resonances.” Since, Red Chamber has been revived by the company.

Hwang and Glass would then reunite for a unique project—a “circus opera” based on the poetry collection Circus Days and Nights by the prolific and hermitic writer Robert Lax. Drawing on the poetry as well as Lax’ personal life, Hwang co-wrote the libretto with the famous circus director Tilde Björfors.

CIRCUS DAYS AND NIGHTS

Commissioned by Cirkus Cirkör and premiering at the Malmö Opera in Sweden in 2021, Circus Days and Nights was also livestreamed worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mark Swed, writing for the Los Angeles Times wrote, “In his libretto, Hwang begins where Lax does, with the line: ‘Sometimes we go on a search/and do not know what we are looking for,/until we come again to our beginning.’ Whether conscious or not (and I suspect not), Glass goes back to his beginnings. The circus tinge to Glass’ score, which is written for a small ensemble and a dramatic accordionist, Minna Weulander, brings to mind the composer’s early studies with French composer Darius Milhaud.”

Hwang’s most recent opera collaborations have both been with Huang Ruo. The pair contributed a one-act opera for a night of shorts called Written in Stone, which investigated what monuments/statues represent. The evening also featured operas by Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran, Kamala Sankaram and A. M. Homes, and Carlos Simon and Marc Bamuthi Joseph.

THE RIFT

Hwang and Huang’s contribution was The Rift, an opera based on Maya Lin’s fight to bring the magnificent Vietnam War memorial to fruition. Written in Stone premiered during the 50th anniversary season of the Kennedy Center and was conducted by Robert Spano. Michele Sims-Burton, in DC Theater Arts, wrote, “The last and most poignant piece, The Rift, interrogates the controversy behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The libretto by Hwang does not disappoint as it reminds the audience of the racism, sexism, and nationalism that are inextricably linked to this monument.”

As a reminder from last week, Hwang had initially intended his greatest commercial success, M. Butterfly, to be a musical but abandoned the idea to get the show moving forward without the tedious process of collaboration. In a way, Hwang finally saw his dream come true when he collaborated with Ruo on an operatic version of M. Butterfly, which premiered the same year as The Rift.

M. BUTTERFLY (Opera)

Ruo mined Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and brought his distinct style to the work, which premiered at the Santa Fe Opera under the baton of Carolyn Kuan and directed by James Robinson. Featuring the rising star countertenor Kangmin Justin Kim as Song Liling, M. Butterfly received mixed notices, but was not without its supporters. Heidi Waleson, in the Wall Street Journal, wrote “This season’s Santa Fe Opera world premiere, M. Butterfly by Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang, is an absorbing new incarnation of Mr. Hwang’s 1988 hit play…The play was ahead of its time, examining Western assumptions about Asians through the lens of gender, and using Puccini’s Madama Butterfly as a touchstone throughout. Today, gender fluidity and the orientalist constructs of Madama Butterfly are regular topics of discussion rather than shocking reveals. The M. Butterfly opera deploys them, through astute dramatic and musical choices, to investigate the political and emotional landscape of this story more deeply.”

*****

Hwang’s work for the music-theatre has also spread to the world of the Broadway musical. In the late nineties, after the success of the Walt Disney Theatrical Company’s production of The Lion King, Hyperion Theatricals—the musicals division—decided to produce an original musical not based on an animated Disney film. Sirs Elton John and Tim Rice were brought in for the project. The chosen subject was the fictional story of the Nubian princess Aida. The character and story had been created by French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette. Working from Mariette’s scenario, Guiseppe Verdi (a second to Puccini as the most performed opera composer) and his librettist Antonio Ghislanzoni fashioned an opera still performed and beloved the world over.

Linda Woolverton, who had written the near perfect screenplay for Beauty and the Beast and had adapted it for the Broadway stage, was brought into the write the book. The musical was originally conceived as a concert for the theatre but turned into a major musical project entitled Elaborate Lives: The Legend of Aida, taking its title from one of the prominent songs. The production tried out in Atlanta, Georgia and was riddled with problems, including a hydraulic pyramid that became the subject of many critical attacks of the show. Disney Theatrical decided to hold off on the project.

AIDA

In the meantime, John produced a concept album of the material from the show and released it under its new name—simply Aida—featuring major singing talents such as Tina Turner, James Taylor, Boyz 2 Men, and LeeAnn Rhimes. “Written in the Stars” (a duet featuring Rhimes and John) had heavy radio play. When interest was built up from the material, the team set back to work. The Artistic Director of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Robert Falls, was brought in to mount the show for Broadway. Falls contacted Hwang to collaborate with him on re-writing the book. Eighty percent of the book was re-arranged, including major changes to the plotting. Rice also re-wrote some lyrics.

Aida opened on Broadway in 2000 to mostly lukewarm reviews. Ben Brantley in the New York Timeswas particularly scathing. “It seems stranded in its own candy-colored limbo, thrashing between childish silliness and civic preachiness, between campy spoof and tragic tear-jerker, between two and three dimensions.” But Aida surpassed the critics’ rants and ended up running for well over one thousand performances, becoming one of the long-running Broadway musicals. The score won the Tony Award, and several national and international tours were successful.

Perhaps the weakest aspect of the libretto is the vague and listless lyrics, but much of the dialogue was well-handled by the cast. Heather Headley, a star from The Lion King, played Aida, Adam Pascal (from the original cast of Rent) played Radames, and the supremely talented Sherie Rene Scott played Amneris. The cast was the one thing critics did agree on, heaping on many bravas. Aida was a major hit, but Hwang’s more prestigious work for the musical theatre was, oddly enough, a collaboration with Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Flower Drum Song has long been admired from afar as the best of the second-tier R & H works (Allegro, Pipe Dream, etc.). It was a risky adaptation of C. Y. Lee’s classic Chinese American novel The Flower Drum Song, which focused on a love triangle and generational conflicts among a family living in San Francisco. The novel was America’s first glimpse into the world of Chinatown and was on the New York Times best-seller list for weeks. Hollywood tried to snag the novel, but it was theatre producer Joseph Fields who bought the rights and suggested the project to Oscar Hammerstein, II.

Hammerstein was no stranger to portraying ethnic diversity in the theatre. It is sometimes hard to remember South Pacific had been a daring and even controversial show to hit the Broadway stage. Many of the backers tried to have “You Have to Be Carefully Taught” excised from the show, but to no avail. R&H gave a go-ahead on the project, and they would be responsible for an important first in the professional theatre: Flower Drum Song was the first show to have a mostly all Asian descent cast. Except for comic actor Larry Blyden and R&H favorite Juanita Hall, everyone else was from Asian ancestry.

With a libretto by Hammerstein and Fields and, under the direction of Hollywood legend Gene Kelly, Flower Drum Song opened on Broadway in 1958 and proved a respectable hit, running for over six hundred performances. In 1961, Universal Pictures released a film version with a screenplay by Fields. The original libretto for the stage show was mostly sketch-like—mostly second-rate compared to the lyrics, which are among Hammerstein’s best. But Fields corrected this with the screenplay, which re-figured many of the musical numbers. The film was also a success and would be Flower Drum Song’s only marshal into the new millennium as reviving a show with so many Asian-American actors seemed an impossibility to many.

Watching the 1996 Broadway revival of The King and I, Hwang was inspired to re-think Flower Drum Song. The musical had become a dusty relic that purported many stereotypes of the Asian American community. But Hwang wondered if the same modern-day staging of The King and I could be applied to the relic, which he had admitted was a guilty pleasure for him and many of Asian descent.

Hwang approached the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization with the idea of throwing out everything in the show except character names and songs and re-writing the book for Flower Drum Song. To the shock of many, the Organization accepted—most likely due to the lack of interest in the show in the post-Civil Rights era. The Organization put Hwang together with choreographer Robert Longbottom, who was looking to make his debut as director. The product that emerged was a book that seemed like it could’ve been written with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s blessing but was also wised-up and thought-provoking. More than anything, the libretto glistened with pride in the Asian American experience.

FLOWER DRUM SONG (Revival)

The show opened in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum in 2001, received ecstatic reviews, and had a sold-out run. Broadway looked like a good possibility and in 2002, the show opened with Rent veteran Jose Llana, Broadway superstar Lea Salonga, and impressive newcomer Sandra Allen in the lead roles, as well as Randall Duk Kim, Jodi Long, and Alvin Ing, who had played Wang Ta in the national tour of the original Flower Drum Song. The show opened to a bevy of strong reviews. Richard Zoglin, in Time, called it “one of the ten best of 2002” while Elysa Gardner in USA Todayadded, “Hwang and Robert Longbottom have retained the show’s irresistible sweetness and added more of the unabashed grandeur that distinguishes Rodgers and Hammerstein’s best loved material.”

There were many critics, however, who became suddenly protective of a musical they never liked much in the first place and the New York Times review was not as kind to the new libretto. But, to the surprise of many, the American Theatre Wing nominated Hwang’s book for the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical—a first for a rewrite. The show would run a little over two hundred performances, unable to make it through the winter with strong crowds. But Hwang’s Flower Drum Song brought more respect to a musical that many had forgotten.

Hwang’s next musical theatre offering was once again commissioned by the Disney Company. Ignoring the obvious project in Mulan, their 1999 film Tarzan became the subject. Scenic Designer Bob Crowley, who had designed Aida, was seeking his directing debut. Though the film was one the only Disney film of the ‘90s to not have a Broadway-style score, the resulting soundtrack was authentic and original, written by former Genesis front man Phil Collins. The film Tarzan was a hit and, significantly, introduced the art of third-dimensional canvas to the world of animation.

TARZAN

The original concept of the stage version was to perform the piece on a ship and tour the East Coast. But this was dropped when Broadway beckoned. Hwang, as always, was intrigued at the idea of two very different cultures colliding and went back to the original source—Edgar Rice Burrough’s novel Tarzan of the Apes. Collins wrote additional songs for the musical, which opened in 2006 to mixed reviews. Whereas the New York Times never much liked Disney shows (excepting The Lion King), other national papers lauded the piece. Gardner, again in USA Today, wrote while she liked other aspects of the show, “it's David Henry Hwang's sprightly libretto that makes this Tarzan fly. Hwang, whose credits range from Disney's Aida to the Tony Award-winning drama M. Butterfly, contributes a script with a light but full heart, one that aims to amuse and enlighten children without patronizing them, or us.”

Hwang’s most recent work for the musical theatre is a bit more complicated. Technically a play with a musical, as he did in Yellow Face, Hwang once again brought a version of himself onto the stage. In late 2015, Hwang was the victim of a random stabbing near his home. He took this personal story and integrated it into his play where DHH is planning to adapt a Chinese film into a romantic comedy for Chinese audiences. After his attack, DHH has a hallucination in which he sees a future where China dominates the world through the concept of soft power—the vision is a reverse King & I which contemplated the outcome of the 2016 election.

SOFT POWER

One of the most successful contemporary Broadway composers, Jeanine Tesori, wrote the score as well as additional lyrics with Hwang. Soft Power began performances at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles in 2018 and was further developed in San Francisco later that year. The Off-Broadway premiere saw Hwang’s return to the Public Theater in New York in 2019, under the direction of his favored collaborator Leigh Silverman. The production (as well as its book and score) was an honoree of the Outer Critics Circle Award and was Hwang’s third work to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A cast recording, available from Ghostlight Records, was nominated for Best Musical Theater Album at the 2021 Grammy Awards.

Frank Rizzo, in Variety, wrote “In Hwang’s very personal expression of cultural estrangement and connection, Soft Power does more than simply come to terms with personal identity—it’s looking at America’s identity, too. It also miraculously manages to be subversive as well as funny, touching and thoroughly entertaining.”

Hwang has firmly established himself as an exceptional librettist as well as a playwright, mastering everything from the art of grand opera to the Broadway musical comedy. In addition to this, he stretched his imagination into the world of dance, composing texts for the Japanese-born American Butoh dancer/choreographer Maureen Fleming (After Eros, with a score by Glass) and Ruby Shang (Yellow Punk Dolls, with a score by John Zorn). In addition, an aborted attempt at an erotic musical with a score by the late Prince resulted in Hwang co-writing the lyrics for the song “Solo” for Prince’s last album for Warner Bros. Records, Come, which went Gold. Additionally, with Brian Greene, Hwang co-wrote the script for the multimedia event Icarus at the Edge of Time, a Philip Glass adaptation of Greene’s novel which premiered at the World Science Festival in 2010 and included a film the British visual artists AL+AL (Al Holmes and Al Taylor).

Next week, David's adventures in Tinseltown...