Aug 29, 2008

M. Butterfly | M. as in Metamorphosis

Jan Herman provides an overview of Hwang's career and the plays that made it successful.

Being Asian-American has always been David Henry Hwang's stock in trade. Since the fall of 1978, when he wrote his first play, F.O.B., as a Stanford undergraduate and saw it open less than two years later at the prestigious New York Public Theater, the playwright has created a large and provocative body of work out of his highly charged sense of cultural identity.

Best known for M. Butterfly, the 1998 Tony-winning play of sexual deceit and romantic delusion that tapped into the troubled East-West history of race, ideology and alienation, Hwang has made his crucial theme the...