Word: hwang
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After dabbling in student journalism and instrumental music, but never acting, Hwang conceived the notion that he was meant to be a playwright. His first work for the stage portrayed a musician asserting his own divinity. What the author remembers most about it is a professor's remark that he plainly knew nothing about creating plays. Undaunted, Hwang succeeded beyond an undergraduate's wildest fantasy with his next try, F.O.B., a reflection on the immigrant experience. Just over a year after the show was staged in his college dorm, it was performed at New York City's pre-eminent...
Still, the productions were mostly brief and small-scale, the livelihood far from lavish. "The least hint of the starving-artist routine," he recalls, "did not behoove my immigrant legacy of belief in education and upward mobility." In 1983, when he was 26, Hwang suffered the sort of crisis of conscience that comes to many people whose success was quick and easy. "I lost belief in my subject matter -- I dismissed it as 'Orientalia for the intelligentsia' -- and virtually stopped writing for two years. I thought seriously about going to law school." After the anxiety passed, Hwang tried to broaden...
Then, at a fateful dinner party just after Rich Relations closed in 1986, Hwang heard the story of Bernard Boursicot, a French diplomat who for nearly two decades carried on an affair with a male Chinese spy he professed to believe was a woman. Boursicot even claimed to have thought he had fathered a child by his "mistress," and when confronted in court with evidence of his partner's true gender, refused to accept it. "I knew right away that this was for me," Hwang said. Where others saw in Boursicot's story one of the odd corners of human...
Having found an idea for a play with which he felt completely attunded -- "I also knew it would not hurt in commercial or career terms to be able to create a great part for a white male" -- Hwang struggled to find a structure that would keep his audience at a comfortable distance from the sexually threatening story line. One day, as he was driving past a Los Angeles record store, he recalled the opera whose title he and his friends so scornfully invoked in college. "I hit on the idea of deconstructing Madama Butterfly, and popped in on impulse...
...Hopkins is playing the character based on Boursicot, and in Buenos Aires and Hamburg. Remarkably for a nonmusical, it has been booked for major productions in Paris, Brussels, Oslo, Copenhagen, Rome, Madrid, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, Sydney, Auckland, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, San Juan and New Delhi. This makes Hwang the first U.S. playwright to become an international phenomenon in a generation, since the heyday of Edward Albee. Dozens of film companies have bid for the rights. Says Hwang: "I guess the play is the thinking person's Fatal Attraction, a reflection of the fear between men and women...