Photo: Michael Palma
More than 30 years after its last Los Angeles production, one of David Henry Hwang’s earliest works, The Dance and the Railroad returns to Los Angeles with a rare revival.
The transcontinental railroad is often remembered as a symbol of American progress. In The Dance and the Railroad, Hwang shifts the focus to the people whose labor made that progress possible. Centering on two Chinese immigrant laborers, Lone and Ma, the Chinese American playwright and screenwriter explores identity, ambition, friendship, artistic expression, and the struggle to maintain a sense of self in an unfamiliar country.
Long before M. Butterfly earned Hwang a Tony Award in 1988, The Dance and the Railroad was already engaging with questions that would become central to his body of work: how people are perceived, how culture shapes identity, and what happens when individuals are reduced to the roles others expect them to play. The Dance and the Railroad premiered in 1981 at New York’s New Federal Theatre and went on to receive a Drama Desk Award nomination for Best Play.