Word: hwang
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...process of reconciling ethnic identity with the pressures of assimilation is an "ongoing" one, Asian-American playwright David Henry Hwang said at a speech in Sever last night, pointing to phases of "evolution" in his own work...
David Henry Hwang, whose Tony award-winning M. Butterfly is still on Broadway, wrote 1000 Airplanes on the Roof and remains true to Glass's experimental use of time and changing rhythm. At one point M, sinking hopelessly into madness, cries out "Time is a lottery!"--a lottery that pays off only delusion. Hwang also plays with the notion of illusion being more powerful than reality, continuing with a theme he develops in M. Butterfly. Like M. Butterfly, 1000 Airplanes on the Roof is in many ways a study of what happens to the human spirit when all conventions...
...Perhaps Hwang and Glass's visionary view does not provide us with the answer we are looking for, but a night with M and 1000 Airplanes on the Roof can guide us to explore the depths of our passions and help us to overcome the limits of our reason...
...playwright, Hwang has his critics within the Asian-American community. Those on the left see him as having sold out to white ways. Those on the right criticize him for airing the dirty linen of the Asian subculture. He is particularly at odds with Asians who pride themselves on the reputation of being a "model minority," with low crime and high SAT scores. "To me," he says, "being stereotyped as superhuman is just another kind of dehumanization. What I love about America is its tradition, not so much of blurring distinctions or subsuming cultures as of different cultures coming...
...contrast to most American dramatists, who have excelled at depicting the struggles of home and hearth but not the larger world, Hwang thinks more shrewdly about mankind than about individual men and women. He has the steel- trap analytic grasp of the champion scholastic debater he once was, the lawyer he thought of becoming. The main weakness of his writing is that its purpose often seems more political than literary, more attuned to social issues than to the private struggles of the human heart. The final scene of M. Butterfly, when the agony of one soul finally takes precedence over...