Bonus Episode: Revisiting David Henry Hwang

 Today, we revisit episode two from season one of Slant Podcast. This is an interview with David Henry Hwang. We do this in celebration of the restaging of his musical Soft Power, now playing at Signature Theatre.

Find us on www.slantpodcast.com and follow us on social media @theslantpodcast

Transcript

Dana 0:21

Today, we revisit episode two from season one of Slant Podcast. This is an interview with David Henry Hwang. We do this in celebration of the restaging of his musical Soft Power, now playing at Signature Theatre.

EPISODE 0:46

Welcome to Slant Podcast. This is Dana Tasso and Virgis. This podcast is an ongoing conversation around the Asian American experience through the lens of artists and luminaries. Thank you for tuning in. Today's guest is Chinese American playwright, librettist, screenwriter, and theater professor, David Henry Huang. His iconic works, M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, and Soft Power, have become part of the American theater vernacular. He illuminates the Asian American experience through sensitive storytelling, humor, And at times sarcasm, David is the winner of a Tony award, three OBs and four outer critics circle awards, just to name a few welcome, David. And thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you for having me. David, your mother. Dorothy Huang was a pianist and your father, Henry Yuan Huang, was a banker. How did those diverse perspectives and their relationship impact you and your art? Wow. Well, they were both immigrants. My father came from Shanghai. And my mom was an ethnic Chinese from the Philippines. And they met at the university of Southern California in the early 1950s at a foreign students dance. And think it was important for me to have a parent who was involved in the arts. Not only because, I mean, it was still kind of hard for me to, as an Asian American, become a playwright, but my mom understood at least an artistic, arc to one's life. And also, because she was a pianist she ended up being the rehearsal pianist for an early production of the theater East West Players, which is the nation's oldest Asian American theater. And They'd only existed for like one or two seasons. My mom became the rehearsal pianist for a production that they did of Minotti's operetta, The Medium, which they set in post war Japan. And I was about 10 years old. And I could have either been babysat by my aunt or gone to rehearsal. So I went to rehearsal. And I don't actually remember that much about the show, but I think in retrospect the fact that I saw Asian Americans, I saw people who look like me as theater artists, as artistic leaders, as directors made it more possible by the time I got to college to envision myself having a career in this field. And in terms of my dad he was a successful entrepreneur who started a bank the first federally charted, chartered Asian American bank on the continental U. S. And I suppose what I learned from him had to do with taking chances. And following something that you want to do and being your own boss even though at the beginning, he was not particularly enamored of the idea of my becoming a playwright. Amazing. What a fascinating background. You know, I had the pleasure of meeting you in 1997 in the lobby of the Kennedy Center during an intermission for your play Golden Child. And I really was. mesmerized and moved by this production because it was the first production of an all Asian theater cast that I had seen in the Kennedy Center. Can you tell us about Golden Child? So first of all thank you for, I'm so glad that our meeting in 1997 went well and was helpful. But Golden Child is a play that's based on my family history. So as I said my mother's family were ethnic Chinese from the Philippines. And they converted to Christianity. My great grandfather converted to Christianity while the majority of the family was still in what we now call Xiamen in China. So My great grandfather would work in the Philippines, but then like a lot of Chinese merchant men in those days, kept his family in China. So, Golden Child is a play based on stories that my grandmother told me when I was also about 10 years old. And I was just one of these kids who was very interested in family history. So, I would always ask her for stories. And about ten years old, she became ill. We thought she was going to pass away. And I thought if she died, it would be doubly tragic, because of course, we'd lose my grandmother, but we would also lose all this history. So at the time, she was still living in the Philippines. I asked my parents if I could spend the summer with her, and I took basically what we would now call oral histories, which I subsequently compiled into kind of a 90 page non fiction quote unquote novel about the history of my family, which got xeroxed and distributed my relatives, it got good reviews and then I really didn't think about it until I was in my 30s and I wanted to revisit these stories. And I feel like as a young person and an Asian American, a Chinese American who was born in Los Angeles I wouldn't have been able to articulate this at 10 years old, but maybe what I was doing was trying to find a way to contextualize my own experience over and above and apart from the images that I was seeing of people who look like me in film and television and the media in general. Which is something that I guess I have ended up doing in one way or another as an adult. One of the things that I. I noticed in much of your work, and you've spoken about it today, is that there is this autobiographic component, the character of the self returns over and over. Can you tell us about that? So I, you know, some people say, write what you know. I like to say write what you don't know about what you know. In other words using writing as a means to discover things about yourself and your relationship to the world around you that you may not have been aware of. And I think this goes back to when I first wanted to be a undergraduate in college. And I didn't know that I was going to end up writing about Asian American or Asian subjects. I just wanted to be a playwright. And then the summer between my junior and senior year, I had the opportunity to study with the great american playwrights sam shepherd and maria irene fornes and they Taught us to write more from our subconscious and once I did that I stopped, you know trying to control What was coming out of my pen I found That these themes and stories started appearing on the page about immigration, about assimilation about racism. So, clearly, some part of me was incredibly interested in these stories, but my conscious mind hadn't figured that out yet. And so ever since then, writing has become a way for me to indeed understand myself better and understand my relationship to the world around me. And it's only been, I, not only, but it's been the past 10 or 12 years that I've started sometimes using autobiographical characters and naming them after myself. But I think the idea of having autobiographical characters is pretty common. in many writers works. In 2002, you premiered a reimagined version of the musical Flower Drum Song, and it's the story of a Chinese family in San Francisco. Can you tell us about why you chose to take on this project and how you developed it? So Flower Drum Song, in the entire history of Broadway, is the only show that is about the lives of Asian Americans. Like there are a fair number of shows about Asians in Asia, whether it's, you know, Pacific Overtures or The King and I, but talking about shows about Asian Americans, Flower Drum Song was it until 2016 when Allegiance the musical that George Takei starred in opened on Broadway. So around the time that I, We first met I started thinking about flower drum song because it had become pretty common on Broadway to do what's called revise the calls, you know, where you take a musical that from the past that has an outdated book or a problematic book, or just not a very good book. Um, but everybody still loves the songs. So, contemporary. playwright comes in and rewrites the book or the script of the musical and you get to keep the songs. So, given that revisicles had become a thing by the late 90s I started feeling, oh, Flower Drum Song is a show by Rodgers and Hammerstein, for those who don't know, from which originally opened in 1958, and it was a hit at the time. Based on the novel by C. Y. Lee, set in San Francisco, Chinatown. And by the time you get to the 90s, Flower Drum Song has pretty much fallen off the face of the earth. People don't produce it, either because it's become problematic and stereotypical or because Producers don't feel that they can cast it you know, unfairly, but or it's just not, it was never considered one of the great Oscar Hammerstein books. He wrote it with Joseph Field. It was during the period when Hammerstein was diagnosed with the cancer that would eventually kill him. And Richard Rodgers always referred to Flower Drum Song as their lucky hit. So, it seems sad to me that, yes, again, there were these kind of great Rodgers and Hammerstein songs. Nobody was was doing them, so why couldn't I do a revisical? So I approached the Rodgers and Hammerstein estate, who were really receptive, and supportive of the idea. And then, at that point, I'd never written a musical, so once I got the, you know, the permission to do it, that I actually had to figure out how you write a musical and that took a while and eventually, working with the director choreographer, Robert Longbottom, and And our musical director, David Chase I learned how they sort of taught me how a musical works. And we ended up premiering our new version of Flower Drum Song. And I think it is fair to say that the book that I wrote, there's probably not a single line from the original Flower Drum Song. But the songs are there overwhelmingly. The same lyrics, although in some cases we went back to earlier drafts of Hammerstein lyrics in the show and we premiered it in LA and it did very well there. And then we brought it to Broadway. In 2014, I saw a production of your play Yellow Face at the JCC theater in Washington, DC. And at the time took 10 of our Asian American Teenage youth dance students to see the show because I just wanted them to know that Asian Americans were in fact, not faceless, that their stories could be seen and heard on stage. And after the show, the students just like they, they reveled in the humor that you presented in the language that you presented showing. this identity confusion that the cast goes through. Can you tell us about yellow face? Yeah. Yellow face is comedy of which is the story of an Asian American playwright named DHH who protests the casting of the Welsh actor, Jonathan Price, as the Eurasian character, the engineer in the musical Miss Saigon when it first comes to Broadway. And of course all that is true. But then DHH subsequently ends up mistakenly casting a white actor in his own play face value, believing that this white actor is of mixed race. And when DHH discovers that's actually not the case, he tries to cover up his mistake to preserve his reputation as an Asian American role model. So, Yellowface probably has the longest gestation of any show that I've written, because in some sense, it dates back to this play Face Value, that in the play Yellowface, The white actor gets cast in the actual face value was indeed by follow up to and butterfly. So it's my second show to be produced on Broadway and it was a huge flop. It closed in previews on Broadway, which means that like, it was so hopeless that the producer just decided we, you know, to shut it down rather than even open the thing. But face value was. Also inspired by the Miss Saigon protest, which I participated in, and Miss Saigon protest was somewhat, was kind of traumatic, because just about every major institution producer theater, op ed writer came out against those of us who were protesting the casting of Jonathan Pryce, and it was kind of intense and scary to be in the middle of a culture wars incident, even back then. So I tried to process this by writing this play, Face Value, which I wanted to do a farce of mistaken racial identity, like to really look at what does it mean to have racial roles imposed on us? And to what extent do we perform our own race? And I think that's an interesting question, but I ended up writing kind of a slamming doors farce. A little bit like noises off or a little bit like Joe Orton, the British playwright from the sixties. And you know, it just, I didn't have time to fix it. So it was this huge flop. But I kept thinking about this idea of of a comedy of mistaken racial identity for the next like 10 or 12 years. And eventually came up with this notion of using the kind of stage documentary form but make up stuff too. So to make it a stage mockumentary. And as you can tell, when I described the premise it's also a comedy of mistaken racial identity, just in a very different form. So the play begins and ends with two real life incidents. One being the protest of the cast of Jonathan Price's casting. And the latter being the charges that were brought against my father in the 90s, when he was accused by the New York Times of laundering money for China which Didn't turn out to be true. And all the charges went away. But it seemed to me that those two incidents were related. And in fact, I think we particularly see again now with the rise of COVID 19 related anti Asian hate, that there is a relationship between the microaggressions, as it were, of yellow face casting and real life consequences. Whether it's the. Persecution of my father or various other policy aggressions and acts of hate against Asian Americans leading up to and including the Georgia massacre. How are you and your family and friends dealing with this resurgence of anti Asian violence in America? This has been, of course, a very difficult time. Ever since really the beginning of the pandemic. So, the sort of silver lining is that at least now for the first time in my life. America is acknowledging and focusing on anti Asian racism, but those of us who are Asians know that we've been feeling particularly vulnerable and there have been a lot of attacks since the beginning of the pandemic and the former president calling it the China virus and all those issues. And I happen to be. A I like to call myself an OG API hate attack survivor because I was stabbed in the neck a few years ago on my block which, you know, then became the musical soft power, which maybe we will also talk about. And if anything, I'm reacting to this by focusing more on. anti Asian initiatives to battle anti Asian hate and panels and awareness. And there is the opportunity now to really look at this in the context of history, which is that Asian Americans, because we are stereotyped as perpetual foreigners, our safety, the way we're regarded in this country, is always a function of America's relationship to our root cultures. And so you see this again and again, whether it's the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the murder of Vincent Chin in the 80s, or things like the accusations against my father. The lie of American racism is that if you play by the rules, if you work hard, you will be accepted. And what we see again and again is that model minority stereotype, it always fails us. And so, Sure enough COVID 19 happens and we're perpetual foreigners. We're the enemy. We're the cause of the virus again. And I think that teaches us once more that accommodating white racism, accommodating systemic racism is not successful. All we can really do is oppose it in solidarity with our BIPOC siblings and white allies. I so appreciate your courage and your clarity and saying that we all need to have a voice and stand up. That's wonderful. Let's go back to 2015. You mentioned that you survived an attack and I understand that this was near your home, actually. Can you tell us how this traumatic event affected you and how you found healing directly in your writing? Yeah. I was just walking home. I'd been to the grocery store about 9 PM one night on a Sunday. And suddenly I felt something hit me on the back of my head hard. And I said, you know, And I turned and I saw a shadowy figure running away. I figured I wasn't going to chase him down. So I just keep on going home. But then I discovered I couldn't walk straight. I veered first into the woods. wall, then into a parked car. I put my hand up to where I'd been hit and it came away covered with blood. I remember from Boy Scouts that you're supposed to put pressure on a wound. So once I did that, I found I could walk straight again. We live about two blocks away from Brooklyn Hospital and I figured I should just get to the ER. So with the help of my wife and daughter I got there and collapsed and you know, I said, I think I'm going to faint now. I did and went into convulsions. We subsequently learned that the attacker had severed my vertebral artery and I'd lost about a third of my blood. The NYPD did not classify this as a hate crime. And we have an assemblyman in New York named Ron Kim from Queens who called a press conference to condemn anti Asian violence back then. So, it's nothing new, but when I started on my next project, which was this musical, Soft Power, that I conceived as kind of a reverse King and I. I was writing along, and all of a sudden, I started writing about my stabbing. And I thought, oh, this is never going to stay in the show. I just need to work this out somehow. The character, again, we have an autobiographical character, DHH, gets stabbed in the neck, and when he passes out, he has this fever dream of a musical. And as we developed the show from premiering in Los Angeles until our New York premiere at the Public Theater pre pandemic, the stabbing became more and more central, and I realized, oh, I had created this kind of psychodrama in a way, artistic psychodrama, that forced me to take my stabbing more seriously. And my collaborators, such as the director, Lee Silverman, and the composer, Janine Tesori, really pushed me to do this. And I came to realize and accept that I was the victim of a hate crime. Why did it take me so long to accept that. And I think that we, whether they're microaggressions, or whether it's getting stabbed in the neck, whether it's someone whispering something under their breath or bumping into us in the street I think we have a tendency to, to want to minimize it, or at least I did. I didn't want to over sensationalize it. I didn't want to politicize it. And in fact, we are just gaslighting ourselves by not admitting when we are the victims of racism, whether they're microaggressions or something more violent. And we have to talk about it and find solidarity in our experiences in order to begin to make the society better. You know, the Asian American community has been traumatized and has sublimated a long history of attacks, so to speak, right? Whether they came in the form of laws, exclusionary acts executive orders, and where do you see the role of art in helping us work through this history? I think the art can help us to remember the history. It can dramatize things, you know, like my stabbing. That often we want to deny, or even I didn't want to call it a racist incident, because the NYPD didn't think it was racist, but now, particularly post Georgia, we realize, oh, you know, the police never want to call anything a hate crime. And I'm also at the moment researching a new play, which will be about something happened 1968. The San Francisco State University third world student strike. And this was when what we now called BIPOC students, what we then called third world solidarity really came together. And this idea of model minority. Had only even come into the popular consciousness in America a year earlier. And the term Asian America was used for the first time during this strike as a sort of radical project. So I think it's important to revisit the roots of who we are as a people. And in this case, the kind of radical and progressive history of Asian Americans in solidarity with other people of color which has kind of been forgotten or ignored in the past decades. So I think that's one way to begin to use art to address what's going on now, to look at the past, to try and reimagine the future. That's inspiring. Thank you. You know, you always seem to have been on the forefront, the cutting edge of so many cultural conversations. I had the pleasure of watching the film M. Butterfly again last week, and I was struck by how ahead of its time it is. It delves into issues of the exoticized gender roles that have long been part of the Asian experience. Will you tell us about that work and really what it means to you today? Sure. So M. Butterfly for those who don't know it is based on the true story of a French diplomat who had a 20 year affair with a Chinese actress who turned out to be a spy and be what we would now call physically male. And the diplomat claimed that he never knew the gender of his lover. And that was the jumping off point for this play that originally was my first Broadway show in 1988. You know, when we did the revival on Broadway in 2017 I rewrote a fair amount of the script. That production was directed by Julie Taymor and starred Clive Owen and Jin Ha. And The show was not as successful as it was in the 80s, but I think that the, I think the rewritten script is better, honestly. And it does reflect the way I feel about the story now, because I think the original M. Butterfly explored a lot of issues for the first time, including stuff that we would now call intersectionality. But it also turned, it was also kind of very gender binary. It turned on the kind of gotcha where we fool the audience into thinking that this Chinese character, Sung Li Ling, is a woman for most of the show. And then and then, you know, Reveal, ha Sung Lee Ling is actually a man. And in that way, it's a little like, The Crying Game, which came after M. Butterfly, and there's a whole story about that I won't go into. But I think the 2017 script tried to look at gender fluidity more, and the degree to which it's not a binary, and gender has a spectrum and to examine the relationship of the Chinese spy and the French diplomat within the context of that spectrum. So, in a sense, your works, every time they're staged, they sort of are revisited and they are reconsidered. Is that right? I have a tendency to want to re look at things if I'm interested in doing so. So, you know, the idea of kind of rewriting the play that I'm best known for is a little unusual, but I had an impulse to do so. That said, there are some plays that when they get revived I don't, you know, I leave them as is. We did a revival off Broadway in 2012 at Signature Theatre in New York of my play, The Dance and the Railroad, which was my second play to be produced in New York off Broadway at the Public Theatre. And for that one, I was like, I don't know how to rewrite this. I was, you know, I was really young and there are some ways that it works that I don't know that I understand anymore. So it kind of depends on the piece. Interesting. You have two children, and when you think about their future, what do you hope for society and for the world that they'll grow old in? So my children are, you know, are multiracial, and so therefore, are exploring their relationship to American society at this moment in a way that feels to me right, for making a new model of how We can operate in this country in the best sense. We have the opportunity, still in this country, despite everything that's screwed up about it and despite the division now and the backlash from the right wing and white nationalists, we still have the opportunity. To create a different perception a more inclusive perception and a more welcoming and equal structure for people no matter where they come from all over the world, including, of course, the indigenous people who came from this land. Our Asian American community is so diverse. We have different cultural values. We have different languages, religious backgrounds. And yet, do you feel that there's a common thread that, that binds us all? I do. I sort of came up during a period when the term Asian American was new, as I was saying a little earlier. And the Asian American umbrella or experiment still seems to me to be really valid because, you know, my experiences as a Chinese American are more similar to someone who's a Vietnamese American or Korean American than they are to a Chinese national. And so just by virtue of. Having a shared set of perceptions the way we're perceived. We do have a kind of unity. And when we include South Asia and We look at how South Asians are also subject to the same stereotype of being perpetual foreigners and the degree to which they experienced a wave of anti Asian hate, particularly after 9 11 and the targeting of Muslims and the anti Islam prejudice in this country. We see the degree to which it's important to stay unified, it's important to fight each other's battles and I would say this extends then even beyond Asians to all people of color, all people who are marginalized. How has this pandemic shifted your consciousness? Was there some sort of Change in thought or change in process that occurred for you? Well, you know, writers are relatively fortunate because we essentially do something alone in our rooms ourselves anyway. So, you know, we're relatively better equipped professionally to do this. But of course, if you're a script writer, all production, you know, shuts down has shut down. So, I think what the pandemic has done is helped me to appreciate the little things I don't get to do anymore that I I won't take for granted. I hope once we start to go back into the world and this certainly includes being in a theater and not just relating to each other on zoom. And I'm hope I will take the time that I have left on. Yeah. In this world and That when it's, when I feel like it's going to be over that I can look back and think that I lived as much as I could and spent the time as well as I could. David, you are an artistic pioneer who has stayed true to your personal identity and who has openly embraced and celebrated your cultural heritage. And so doing. You've enlivened universal themes that resonate with all audiences. I want to thank you for your continued courage and for generously being an artistic mentor to so many. Wishing you the best of luck in your future endeavors. Thank you. Thank you so much. This was really a fun and engaged conversation. Take care.

Dana 35:56

Thank you for tuning in today. Please rate the podcast on your listening platform and tell your friends. Feel free to contact me at slantpodcast. com. It's always great to hear from you, our listeners. A special thanks to our sponsors, the Dana Tassun Burgess Dance Company, the Cherry Blossom Giving Circle, and the Dehde Liam Gunawan Hickory Legacy Fund.