David Henry Hwang, Long the leading Asian American playwright, he was writing autofictional works about identity politics decades before those were cultural obsessions.
ACT I OF David Henry Hwang’s working day begins with no foreshadowing of the characters or the noise, the drama and the plot twists that may await him. Morning. Any weekday. The ground floor of a brownstone in the leafy, arty Brooklyn enclave known to its residents as Fort Greene. Hwang shares this home with the actress Kathryn Layng, his wife of more than 30 years; they have a grown son, Noah, and daughter, Eva, and a small, intermittently indignant dog, Dumpling. But when the curtain rises, he is alone in his roomy office, seated behind a desk wide enough to hold a large computer monitor and a stand for a yellow legal pad, but not deep enough to accommodate the clutter of potential distractions. He bought the desk in 2012 at an auction by the estate of Arthur Laurents, the legendarily irascible writer-director whose credits include the book for “Gypsy” (1959). Hwang never met him but loves the show. He used to wonder if Laurents would be pleased that another playwright is now using his desk. “Then I thought,” he says, “ ‘Wherever he is, he probably has other things to think about.’”
Hwang, 68, is methodical but also intuitive. He has many projects going at once and, in the absence of deadline pressure, gravitates toward whichever of them is tempting him. He has been at this long enough to know the conditions he needs to write: The beginning of the day is always best; background music is unhelpful, as is the conversational hum of a Starbucks. A private space — this private space — is essential. One wall of the office is covered with posters of his hits, his duds and his in-betweens, the brickwork of a life spent in theater. But from where he sits, he can, as long as he keeps his eyes on what’s directly in front of him, avoid having his attention diverted by all this evidence of his long history as a playwright.
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