David Henry Hwang (born August 11, 1957) is a contemporary American playwright who has risen to prominence as the preeminent Asian American dramatist in the U.S.

He was born in Los Angeles, California and was educated at Stanford University and the Yale School of Drama. His first play was produced at the Okada House dormitory at Stanford and he briefly studied playwriting with Sam Shepard and María Irene Fornés.

Many of his plays concern the role of the Chinese American and Asian American in the modern day world. His first play, the Obie Award-winning FOB, depicts the contrasts and conflicts between established Asian Americans and "Fresh Off the Boat" newcomer immigrants. The play was developed by the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center and premiered in 1980 Off-Broadway at Joseph Papp's Public Theater. Papp went on to produce four more of Hwang's plays, including the Pulitzer Prize-nominated drama The Dance and the Railroad, which tells the story of a former Chinese opera star working as a coolie laborer in the nineteenth century and Family Devotions, a darkly comic take on the effects of Western religion on a Chinese family.

After this, Papp also produced the show Sound and Beauty, the omnibus title to two Hwang one-act plays set in Japan. His next play, Rich Relations, was his first to feature non-Asian characters. It premiered at the Second Stage Theatre in New York and, though not a success, did prepare him for his work on his most well-known play — some consider it his masterpiece — M. Butterfly, for which he won a Tony Award, the Drama Desk Award, the John Gassner Award, and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Play. It was also his second play to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play is a clever and brilliant deconstruction of Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly. The play is also loosely based on news reports of the relationship between a French diplomat, Bernard Boursicot, and Shi Pei Pu, a male Chinese opera singer who purportedly convinced Boursicot that he was a woman throughout their twenty-year relationship. The play premiered on Broadway in 1988 and made Hwang the first Asian American to win the Tony Award for Best Play.

The success of M. Butterfly prompted Hwang's interests in many different directions, including work for opera, film, television, and the musical theatre. Throughout the 1990s, he continued to write for the stage, including short plays for the famed Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville and Golden Child, which received its world premiere at South Coast Repertory in 1996. Golden Child later became his second Broadway venture and won the 1997 Obie Award for its Off-Broadway production and gave Hwang his second Tony nomination.

In the new millennium, he has continued to work solidly in all areas of dramatic writing. His third Broadway success was a radical revision of Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, II, and Joseph Fields' musical Flower Drum Song. Although extremely successful when introduced in the 1950s and early 1960s, it had become dated after the Civil Rights Movement redefined the viability of stereotypical portrayals of Asian American communities. Though it fell from favor relative to other Rodgers and Hammerstein productions such as South Pacific, it inspired another generation of Asians such as Hwang to re-imagine the musical. Adapted from the novel The Flower Drum Song by C. Y. Lee, it tells the story of a culture clash with a Chinese family living in San Francisco. The Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization allowed Hwang to significantly rework the plot, while retaining character names and songs. His version — both an homage to the original and a modern re-thinking — won him his third Tony nomination. Though Flower Drum Song is often called the first musical with an all-Asian cast, it was the 2002 revival of the play which was finally produced with an all-Asian cast of actor-singers. The original production had cast many non-Asians in leading roles, including Caucasians and even an African-American (Juanita Hall) to play Chinese characters. Though some were disappointed it was not as big of a hit as the original, it went on to a national tour.

Hwang's new full-length play Yellow Face, which centers on his one failed Broadway experiment Face Value, premiered in Los Angeles in 2007 at the Mark Taper Forum, as a co-production with East West Players, and is having its Off-Broadway premiere this December at Joseph Papp's Public Theater. He also penned the English language libretto for an operatic adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland with music by the Korean composer Unsuk Chin, which received its world premiere at the Bavarian State Opera in 2007.

In February, 2007, Plácido Domingo announced that Hwang would be writing the libretto to a new opera based on the 1986 David Cronenberg film The Fly. Cronenberg is was also announced to direct the opera with Howard Shore reprising his role as composer. Domingo announced that he would conduct.

Hwang's work for the stage includes FOB, The Dance and the Railroad, Family Devotions, The House of Sleeping Beauties (adapted from Yasunari Kawabata's novella House of the Sleeping Beauties), The Sound of a Voice, As the Crow Flies, Rich Relations, M. Butterfly, Bondage, Face Value, Trying to Find Chinatown, Bang Kok, Golden Child, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt (co-written with Stephan Muller), Jade Flowerpots and Bound Feet, the children's play Tibet Through the Red Box (based upon Peter Sis' book), and Yellow Face.

His music-theatre work includes the texts for Philip Glass' 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, The Voyage, and The Sound of a Voice, the book for Elton John and Tim Rice's Aida (co-written by Linda Woolverton and Robert Falls), the Walt Disney Company's theatrical version of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan, the libretti for Bright Sheng's The Silver River, Osvaldo Golijov's Ainadamar, and Unsuk Chin's Alice in Wonderland as well as Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song.

He has also written a number of screenplays, including David Cronenberg's adaptation of M. Butterfly, John Madden's Golden Gate, and Neil LaBute's Possession (co-written with Laura Jones and LaBute, adapted from the novel by A. S. Byatt). He also wrote the teleplay for the NBC mini-series The Lost Empire, directed by Peter MacDonald. He served as a script advisor for the film Picture Bride. In 2003, Susan Hoffman directed a film adaptation of The Sound of a Voice entitled Sound of a Voice, written by and starring Lane Nishikawa and Natsuko Ohama.

As another extension of his interests, he penned the texts for three dance pieces: Ruby Shang's Yellow Punk Dolls and Dances in Exile as well as Maureen Fleming's After Eros (with music by Philip Glass). He also co-wrote the Prince song "Solo" for his album Come.

In 1999, Hwang starred in a short film by Greg Pak called Asian Pride Porn, which combined humor and serious social commentary to parody the Asian fetish and the prevalence of Asian fetish pornography. As himself, he has appeared in the documentary films Hollywood Chinese, Happy Birthday Oscar Wilde, and Literary Visions.

He has been awarded numerous grants, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Pew Charitable Trusts. He has been honored with awards from the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund , the Association for Asian Pacific American Artists, the Museum of Chinese in the Americas, the East West Players, the Organization of Chinese Americans, the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, the Center for Migration Studies, the Asian American Resource Workshop, the China Institute, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 1998, the nation's oldest Asian American theatre company, the East West Players, christened its new mainstage The David Henry Hwang Theatre.

Mr. Hwang sits on the boards of the Dramatists Guild, Young Playwrights Inc., and the Museum of Chinese in the Americas. He conducts interviews on arts-related topics for the national PBS cable television show Asian America. From 1994-2001, he served by appointment of President Bill Clinton on the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

David Henry Hwang holds honorary degrees from Columbia College in Chicago and The American Conservatory Theatre. He lives in New York City with his wife, actress Kathryn Layng, and their children, Noah David and Eva Veanne.

* Broken Promises, New York: Avon, 1983. (out-of-print; includes FOB, The Dance and the Railroad, Family Devotions, and The House of Sleeping Beauties) * M. Butterfly, New York: Plume, 1988. (Acting edition published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.; audio version available from L. A. Theatre Works; film version available from Warner Bros. Home Video) * 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof, Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1989. (Original Music Recording available from Virgin Records) * Between Worlds: Contemporary Asian-American Plays, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1990. (includes Hwang's As the Crow Flies and The Sound of a Voice) * FOB and Other Plays, New York: New American Library, 1990. (out-of-print; includes FOB, The Dance and the Railroad, The House of Sleeping Beauties, The Sound of a Voice, Rich Relations and 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof) * Golden Child, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1998. (Acting edition published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.) * Trying to Find Chinatown: The Selected Plays, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1999. (includes FOB, The Dance and the Railroad, Family Devotions, The Sound of a Voice, The House of Sleeping Beauties, Bondage, The Voyage, and Trying to Find Chinatown) * Rich Relations, New York: Playscripts, Inc., 2002. * Flower Drum Song, music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, book by David Henry Hwang; based upon the libretto by Oscar Hammerstein, II and Joseph Fields and the novel The Flower Drum Song by C. Y. Lee; New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2003. (Broadway Cast Recording available from DRG) * 2004: The Best Ten-Minute Plays for Two Actors, New Hampshire: Smith and Kraus, 2003. (includes Hwang's Jade Flowerpots and Bound Feet) * Peer Gynt (with Stephan Muller), based upon the play by Henrik Ibsen; New York: Playscripts, Inc., 2006. * Tibet Through the Red Box, based upon the book by Peter Sis; New York: Playscripts, Inc., 2006.

<noinclude>

Hwang, David Henry Hwang, David Henry Hwang, David Henry Hwang, David Henry Hwang Hwang, David Henry Hwang, David Henry