Jeanine Tesori and David Henry Hwang
The Tony Award winners create a musical within a play for the Public Theater production of their Soft Power Off-Broadway.
It often happens that real-life events will steer a new work in development, in unexpected directions. In the case of Soft Power, the new musical-within-a-play co-written by Tony winners David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori, two major events are worth nothing: in late 2015, Hwang was stabbed in the neck while walking home with groceries in Brooklyn, and the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.
The original idea behind Soft Power, directed by Leigh Silverman at the Public Theater following two hit West Coast runs, was a “parallel King and I” in which a Chinese executive becomes an advisor to President Hillary Clinton; Hwang’s impulse, from the beginning, was to subvert the white-savior trope at the heart of such stories. Following the election, however, the show became an exploration of America’s current place in the world.