Tony Award-winning playwright talks about new play and US-China relations

David Henry Hwang (right) and Leigh Silverman (left) at Capital M

By Liang Meilan

Last Saturday at Capital M restaurant, theater fans and professionals got a rare chance to interact with an award-winning playwright – David Henry Hwang – who is in China to do research for a new play.

Known for writing cross-cultural plays – including M. Butterfly, which won the 1988 Tony Award for Best Play – Hwang said Sino-US relations will be a big subject for him in the next arc of his work.

Hwang was accompanied at Capital M by Broadway director Leigh Silverman. The two recently concluded a two-week research trip in Guiyang, Guizhou Province, seeking inspiration for their new co-production, Chinglish, which will premiere at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago next June.

The two first collaborated three years ago on the play Yellow Face, which was about a Chinese American playwright (representing Hwang the actual playwright) who accidentally casts a Caucasian as an Asian and spends much of the play trying to justify the selection. Similarly, Chinglish will be another cross-cultural comedy, but this time it’ll be about an American business man who travels to Guiyang,  hoping to make an important deal before finding himself enmeshed in a system more complex than he ever imagined.

“My stay in Guiyang in relationship to the play was to get nuance, specificity and a depth of understanding that I never would by just reading a book or doing research on the Internet,” Silverman said. “The smell of the air should be present in the play, so to speak. With my experience, I can go back home and tell my designer what to do. And also, I heard Dong minority music performed by local folk artists, which gave me a fuller understanding of the music’s meaning.”

After reading many books about business, Hwang saw huge differences between doing business in China and in America. But it took an actual trip to China to hammer those differences home. “It requires a personal look to see the cultural differences and ideas between the old world and the new world,” he said.

In Guiyang, Hwang and Silverman spoke about a variety of topics. “We talked about the fast speed of Westernization in China,” Hwang said. “(The Chinese) refuse to embrace the so-called ‘branded modernization’ because they view it as a Western concept. China has developed its own modernity on its own terms, which is greatly reflected in doing business here.”

Hwang said that as in Yellow Face, his new work should focus on cultural differences and similarities and cross-cultural communication. “I enjoy rewriting a play with new ideas gained from close research or sitting with audiences and hearing profound perspectives from them,” he said.

Looking to the future, Hwang wants to continue tackling subjects related to US-China cultural differences and write about US-China relations. “Through the larger project, I hope to come out with a sense of what is the real dynamic at work here, as you have one country that’s the old superpower and another country that is becoming the next superpower,” Hwang said in an earlier interview with the Beijinger.