David Henry Hwang

David Henry Hwang (born August 11, 1957) is an American playwright, librettist, screenwriter, and theater professor at Columbia University in New York City.

He has won three Obie Awards for his plays FOB, Golden Child, and Yellow Face.

Three of his works (M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, and Soft Power) have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

He was born in 1957 in Los Angeles, California, to Henry Yuan Hwang, the founder of Far East National Bank, and Dorothy Hwang, a piano teacher.

The oldest of three children, he has two younger sisters.

In summer 1978, he studied playwriting with Sam Shepard and attended Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, both of which led him to write his first plays such as FOB.

Hwang's early plays concerned the role of the Chinese American and Asian American in the contemporary world.

His first play, FOB, explores the contrasts and conflicts between established Asian Americans and "Fresh Off the Boat" new immigrants.

He received a bachelor's degree in English from Stanford University in 1979 and attended the Yale School of Drama between 1980 and 1981, taking literature classes.

He left once workshopping of new plays began, since he already had a play being produced in New York.

His first play was produced at the Okada House dormitory (named Junipero House at the time) at Stanford University after he briefly studied playwriting with Sam Shepard and María Irene Fornés.

The play was developed by the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center and premiered in 1980 Off-Broadway at the Joseph Papp Public Theater.

In 1981 it won an Obie Award for Best New American Play.

Papp produced four more of Hwang's plays, including two in 1981: The Dance and the Railroad, which tells the story of a former Chinese opera star working as a coolie laborer in the 19th-century American West, and Family Devotions, a darkly comic take on the effects of Western religion on a Chinese-American family.

This was nominated for the Drama Desk Award.

Those three plays added up to what the author described as a "Trilogy of Chinese America."

After this, Papp also produced the show Sound and Beauty, the omnibus title to two Hwang one-act plays set in Japan.

At this time, Hwang started to work on projects for the small screen.

A television movie, Blind Alleys, written by Hwang and Frederic Kimball and starring Pat Morita and Cloris Leachman, was produced in 1985 and followed a television version of The Dance and the Railroad.

His next play Rich Relations, was his first full-length to feature non-Asian characters.

It premiered at the Second Stage Theatre in New York.

Hwang's best-known play was M. Butterfly, which premiered on Broadway in 1988.

The play is a deconstruction of Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly, alluding to news reports of the 20th-century relationship between French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu, a male Chinese opera singer.

Shi purportedly convinced Boursicot that he was a woman throughout their twenty-year relationship.

The play won numerous awards for Best Play: a Tony Award (which Hwang was the first Asian American to win), the Drama Desk Award, the John Gassner Award, and the Outer Critics Circle Award.

It was the first of three of his works to become a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

The success of M. Butterfly prompted Hwang's interests in many other different directions, including work for opera, film, and the musical theatre.

Hwang became a frequent collaborator as a librettist with the world-renowned composer Philip Glass.

One of M. Butterfly's Broadway producers, David Geffen, oversaw a film version of the play, which was directed by David Cronenberg.

Hwang also wrote an original script, Golden Gate, which was produced by American Playhouse.

Hwang wrote an early draft of a screenplay based upon A. S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning novel Possession, which was originally scheduled to be directed by Sydney Pollack.

Throughout the 1990s, Hwang continued to write for the stage, including short plays for the famed Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville.

His full-length Golden Child, received its world premiere at South Coast Repertory in 1996.

Golden Child was later produced in New York City.

It won a 1997 Obie Award for playwriting for Hwang's 1996 off-Broadway production.

In 1998 it was produced on Broadway, and was nominated that year for a Tony Award for Best Play.

In the new millennium, Hwang had two Broadway successes back-to-back.

He was asked by director Robert Falls to help co-write the book for the musical Aida (based upon the opera by Giuseppe Verdi).

In an earlier version, it had failed in regional theatre tryouts.

Years later, director/playwright Neil LaBute and Laura Jones would collaborate on the script for a 2002 film.