Teaching Artist Leah Reddy spoke with playwright David Henry Hwang about his work on Yellow Face.
Leah Reddy: What is your theatre origin story?
David Henry Hwang: For the most part, I didn’t start writing plays and seriously get involved with theatre until I was an undergraduate. Prior to that I’d been a violinist. So, I’d played in pit orchestras for high school musicals, and I was always curious about it.
If you go back a little further, there’s a company in Los Angeles called East West Players, which is now the nation’s oldest Asian American theatre.
When [East West Players was] founded, I believe in 1965, they did an operetta. And my mother was the pianist for the production. I was about eight and I could either have chosen to be babysat by my aunt or hang out at rehearsal. So, I went to rehearsals, and I don’t remember that much to be honest, but I do think in retrospect that it’s interesting that at a young age I saw people who looked like me being actors and directors and in positions of artistic administration.
And maybe that made it more possible when I got to college and started thinking that I wanted to try to write plays.
LR: You use imagery and theatrical styles from Asian theatre in a fair number of your works. How did that influence your understanding of the playwriting art form, and do you see any influences of that in Yellow Face?
DHH: My first play to be produced in New York was written when I was an undergraduate. It’s called FOB. We did it in my dorm, and then 14 months later it opened at the Public Theater.
The play was a comedy about growing up Chinese American in Southern California. But it was set against a mythological backdrop where there were figures from Chinese and Chinese American mythology.
I borrowed this technique from the author Maxine Hong Kingston whose book, The Woman Warrior, had come out recently. And so, when it came around to staging the [play], at the Public, we started incorporating Chinese theatre forms to tell these mythological stories.
At the time, I really didn’t know anything about Chinese opera. Mako, who was directing, cast an actor named John Lone, who would eventually go on to play the title role in Bertolucci’s movie The Last Emperor. John had been brought up in Cantonese Opera, so he had a lot of knowledge, and I learned from him.
Then I wrote a second play, The Dance in the Railroad, which also ended up at the Public, specifically for John and another dancer-actor named Tzi Ma who now is everybody’s Asian dad on television or in movies. That also attempted to incorporate Chinese opera forms.
I continued to work with these techniques through M. Butterfly and other plays. I think when it comes to Yellow Face, I was purposely trying to get away from that because I felt like my use of Asian stagecraft was maybe a little exotic, and it might be interesting to try to do a play where I didn’t incorporate any of those techniques. You could argue that the structure and the meta and the upfront theatricalism in Yellow Face has a relationship to Asian theatre forms the same way that it has a relationship to say Brecht, who was also very influenced by these same forms.
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