"Arena in Washington, D.C., did the play a few years ago, and there are certain things now that resonate differently than they did in 1988," Hwang says. The Los Angeles-born playwright, now 49 and living in New York, notes that parts of the subtext have changed in interesting ways. Guan from the Broadway cast and his son Nicholas Guan, who debuted on Broadway as the baby in "M. Now the South Bay company is reviving the play, with Mark Capri and Francis Jue reprising their roles of Rene Gallimard and Song Liling from the 1992 production (roles originated on Broadway by John Lithgow and B.D.
A touring production brought it to the Curran in San Francisco in 1991, and TheatreWorks followed with its own production the following year. Butterfly," Hwang's 1988 Broadway hit that made him the first (and so far only) Asian American playwright to win a Tony Award for best play. In short, in his mind he must have cast himself as Pinkerton in the Puccini opera "Madama Butterfly." So when Hwang looked at the French intelligence scandal and asked himself, "How could he not have known?," the answer he came up with was that the diplomat must have been caught up in some fantasy of the blushing Asian flower overwhelmed by her manly Occidental seducer. His 1981 Pulitzer-finalist follow-up, "The Dance and the Railroad," had brought together Chinese opera and 19th century Chinese American railroad workers.
His first play, the Obie Award-winning "FOB," which premiered off-Broadway at Joseph Papp's Public Theatre in 1980 when Hwang was still in his early 20s, was initially inspired by wondering what might happen if Fa Mu Lan from Maxine Hong Kingston's book "The Woman Warrior" met Gwan Gung from Frank Chin's play "Gee, Pop!" in a Chinese restaurant in Torrance (Los Angeles County). When David Henry Hwang first heard about French diplomat Bernard Boursicot, arrested in 1982 for passing intelligence to Chinese opera singer Shi Pei Pu, his reaction was like a lot of people's: jaw-dropping incredulity at Boursicot's insistence that he never knew that his lover of 18 years, and alleged mother of his child, was a man.īut as a playwright, Hwang (pronounced "Wong") is in the business of drawing connections.
Facebook Twitter Email 5 - Francis Jue in TheatreWorks� 1992 production of M.
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