David Henry Hwang is one of the foremost contemporary American playwrights, a Tony Award winner, and the only Asian-American author to have not one but four Broadway productions under his belt. Esther Kim Lee has now produced an essential new monograph on Hwang's oeuvre over the past thirty-five years. Comprehensive in scope and written in accessible yet engaging style, Lee's study retraces Hwang's career from his initial steps into playwriting in the early 1980s to his remarkable achievements as a leading voice in Asian American theatre. Unlike previous scholarship, Lee offers valuable analysis of hitherto overlooked texts, such as Face Value (1993), as well as of his most recent production, Kung Fu (2014). The book comprises an introduction and six chapters, in addition to an extensive bibliography and a chronology of Hwang's life and work.
In the introduction, Lee details Hwang's numerous accomplishments while also asking the crucial and still-debated question of why he is ‘the only Asian American playwright to have been produced on Broadway’ to date (p. 2). Lee outlines what Hwang himself has dubbed his ‘assimilationist’, ‘isolationist–nationalist’, and ‘multiculturalist’ phases (the latter is Lee's own coinage), while exploring key motifs in his dramaturgy such as race, identity, autobiography, family relations, notions of ‘face’, mask and ‘deception’ (pp. 4–5), irony, and meta-theatre. She further underscores the role of music and sound – as well as silence – in his plays, and the integration of traditional Chinese theatrical aesthetics.
The first five chapters offer perceptive readings of Hwang's plays from 1980 to 2014. In addition to providing detailed textual analyses, production histories, and new commentary on the works that earned Hwang international fame, Lee delves for the first time into scripts that have hitherto received scant scholarly attention, yet are equally essential to grasp the underlying concerns of his poetics.
Chapter 1 surveys Hwang's ‘Trilogy of Chinese America’ (1980–1) from the perspective of magical realism and the ‘Californian cool’, as Lee terms it (p. 10). Chapter 2 investigates four lesser-known plays written between 1983 and 1986, which testify to an expansion of Hwang's thematic range beyond Chinese America, and exploration of new playwriting styles. These include the ‘Japanese plays’ The Sound of a Voice and The House of Sleeping Beauties, both of which premiered in 1983. Lee places Hwang's dramas within Asian-American culture, with references to the writings of Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin, while also providing a global context through discussions of his affinity with such authors as Sam Shepard, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Yasunari Kawabata. Lee emphasizes the dialectical quality of Hwang's writings, which resist univocal readings by lending themselves to divergent interpretations. One example is his best-known and most widely studied piece, M. Butterfly (1988) – the subject of chapter 3 – in which Hwang's talent for dramaturgical ambiguity and enigmatic solutions reaches full maturity. Lee minutely details the play's production and reception history, key interpretations of it, and its enduring legacy.
Chapter 4 looks at four plays from the 1990s that tackle questions of identity and multiculturalism. Lee addresses Hwang's involvement in the debate over the controversial casting of the 1990 Broadway production of Miss Saigon, which would subsequently inform the writing of Yellow Face (2007), surveyed in chapter 5. In this section on Hwang's post-millennial plays, Lee also offers the first detailed criticism of his ‘dancical’ (p. 124) drama on Bruce Lee – Kung Fu (2014).
Lee takes an insightful, if unusual, polyphonic approach in the sixth and last chapter, in which three essays by Josephine Lee, Dan Bacalzo and Daphne Lei complement her analysis with additional perspectives on, respectively, Flower Drum Song (2002), Golden Child (1996), and Chinglish (2011). Overall, Lee's meticulously researched book constitutes essential reading for scholars and students of American, Asian-American and global Chinese theatres, while also laying the foundation for future studies into areas of Hwang's multifaceted career – for instance, his activities in television, film and opera production – that still wait to be explored.
