TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081489/08148900.001

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 12.5 KB | 229 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 62

When East And West Collide


DAVID HENRY HWANG proves bedfellows make strange politics in M.
Butterfly, a surprise stage success on three continents

By William A. Henry III


    When David Henry Hwang was a student at Stanford
University, he and fellow residents of the "Asian-American theme
dorm" used to refer derisively to any female peer who seemed
overly deferential, too traditionally feminine, as "doing a
Butterfly." Hwang, for one, had no actual complaint against
Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly. In fact, he had never seen or
even heard it. But what he had gleaned of the plot -- about a
Japanese girl who kills herself for love of a faithless American
sailor -- summed up for him many of the stereotypes Westerners
imposed on Orientals. He and his ilk, he believed, were expected
to be submissive and fawning, often deceitful, and to show scant
regard for human lives, especially their own.

    Hwang had not always been so sensitive, so ready to take
offense. Although his parents were immigrants and he visited
relatives in Manila and Taipei, this self-described
"Chinese-Filipino-American, born-again-Christian kid from
suburban Los Angeles" felt "scarcely more connection than the
average white" between Asian life and his own. "I read Pearl
Buck in high school and didn't see anything wrong. I still like
Charlie Chan movies. The whole thing about being of Chinese
descent seemed an interesting detail, as if I had red hair. But
not everyone saw it that way." So Hwang embarked on Asian
studies in an adolescent search for identity: "I got more and
more interested in responding to stereotypes by painting our own
portraits." From that political impulse, an artistic career was
born.

    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 off-Broadway showcase, Joseph Papp's
Public Theater. That 1980 triumph and the six modestly
successful plays that followed led to foundation grants, movie
and TV script deals and enough theater productions to enable
Hwang to shuttle between New York City and Los Angeles while
supporting himself entirely by writing.

    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 his
horizons in Rich Relations, his first play not about Asians. To
his disappointment but not surprise, critics took him to task.
"There is in this country," he says, "a misguided belief that
women should write about women, blacks about blacks, the Chinese
about the Chinese, and so on. White males can write about
anybody."

    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 life, Hwang
perceived in it -- or reinvented it to be -- a reflection of
decades of megatrends, from the French fiasco in Viet Nam and
the waning of imperialism to '60s Maoism in both China and the
West, from feminism to male chauvinist backlash. "What
interested me most from the start," he recalls, "was the idea
of the perfect woman. A real woman can only be herself, but a
man, because he is presenting an idealization, can aspire to the
idea of the perfect woman. I never had the least doubt that a
man could play a woman convincingly on the stage."

    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.
As soon as I looked at the libretto, I knew it would be fine."
He finished a draft in six weeks, in Los Angeles and then in
France, where he had gone to mark his first wedding anniversary.

    M. Butterfly reached Broadway in March 1988, where it won
the Tony Award as best play of the season, and has grossed $17
million so far. The show has also been mounted in London, where
Anthony 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 and a kind of
intellectual striptease. It's also about the West's fear of how
its relationship with the East is changing. Sophisticated
American whites realize their group is in the process of
changing from an outright majority to just a plurality in the
U.S., and are beginning to be ready to hear what the rest of us
think."

    Success exacted its most customary price. Hwang's wife
Ophelia stayed back in Los Angeles through most of the months
of rehearsals and tryouts, and the fledgling marriage broke up
soon after. Ever since, Hwang has lived a luxurious if somewhat
work-obsessed life in Manhattan, in a rented midtown apartment
with spectacular wraparound views. The place came furnished --
not even the throw pillows are his -- but he vows to decorate
in style a newly purchased Manhattan triplex to which he will
move in October. He rarely cooks or eats at home; instead he
deftly table-hops at fashionable restaurants and dates "now and
then." His "vice, if I have any," is clothing from Issey Miyake
and other Asian designers.

    Hwang is keenly aware of the F. Scott Fitzgerald dictum
that American lives have no second acts, that youthful success
leads to mid-life burnout and embitterment. A few months after
M. Butterfly opened, he and avant-garde composer Philip Glass
mounted 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, a multimedia oddity that
proved too abstruse for the masses yet too tabloid for
intellectuals; it centers on an apparent close encounter with
aliens from space. In multiple productions it showed scant
commercial potential. In addition to the screenplay for M.
Butterfly, which Hwang will write himself, he is working on
three other films: a TV movie for PBS, which he will also
direct, about a love affair between an FBI agent and the
daughter of a man he hounded to death; "a Victorian rock
musical about Oscar Wilde"; and a semiadventure set in Tibet.
For the stage, he and Glass hope to adapt Andre Malraux's novel
of revolutionary China in the 1920s, Man's Fate, and Hwang is
also writing what he opaquely terms a "multicultural farce."

    The richest literary material available to Hwang may be his
own family. His mother's forebears moved from China to the
Philippines in the 19th century and founded a trading company
that at one point owned the national franchises for Coca-Cola
and General Motors. "Basically," he says, "they were plutocrats
and oppressors. The whole history of Chinese merchants in
Southeast Asia is ambiguous. They provide prosperity but also
isolate themselves and take profit from the local population."
His mother grew up in a walled family compound until the
Japanese commandeered it during World War II. Then the clan
moved into a "haunted house" in Manila. Legend had it that
someone from each family who lived there would die in the place.
"No one did in our family, which was attributed by my relatives
to their fundamentalist Christianity. My mother's grandmother
was a sort of exorcist, casting out demons. To say that
`so-and-so was dead until we prayed for him and he came back to
life' was perfectly ordinary dinner-table conversation."

    While Hwang's mother's family refused to do business with
the Japanese, he says, "My father's father was something of a
collaborator." Later on, in Taiwan, that grandfather went to
jail in a financial scandal. Hwang's own father decided as a boy
to leave China; as a younger son, he foresaw few opportunities,
and as a believer in technology and progress, he was at odds
with a traditional culture. After writing to Harvard and Yale
for applications and receiving no reply, he wound up at
Linfield College in Oregon. "When I was little," Hwang recalls,
"my father literally owned a Chinese laundry."

    In 1974 the elder Hwang, by then a C.P.A., launched Far
East National Bank, which specialized in loans to Asian
immigrants and which now has four branches in California. Two
years after the bank opened, he was kidnaped for ransom, then
released within a few hours after the money was taken. Says the
son: "I was in college at the time and did not hear about it
until the crisis was over. The case was never solved, and some
people have suggested that my father staged the episode as a
publicity stunt. My father may be a little weird, but he's not
a criminal." More recently, the bank has been at the center of
a political controversy: Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley accepted
$18,000 as a consultant last year, then returned the pay after
critics suggested it had been a quid pro quo for helping secure
the bank a deposit of $2 million in city funds.

    As a 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 to live
together side by side. If I have children, and I hope I do, I
would be pleased if their mother happens not to be of Chinese
descent. The child who is a mixture of different types
represents the world's future."

    In 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 broad-ranging commentary,
is among the most forceful in the history of the American
theater. Nothing else he has written comes close to it. If Hwang
can again fuse politics and humanity, he has the potential to
become the first important dramatist of American public life
since Arthur Miller, and maybe the best of them all.