Tony Award-Winning Playwright David Hwang: 'US-China Relations is going to be a big subject for me in the next arc of my work'

At 4 o'clock this afternoon at Capital M, renowned playwright David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) and director Leigh Silverman will give a talk about director-playwright dynamics -- using themselves as exhibit A -- and preview their latest project in development. Admission, which includes a drink, is 65 RMB -- a bargain for theater enthusiasts and anyone else interested in hearing accomplished artists discuss their craft.

Hwang and Silverman, who first collaborated three years ago on the play Yellow Face, are here to do research for a play about an American businessman working in China. Like Yellow Face, this new work should touch on issues of identity, race and inter-culture communication in alternately serious, poignant and funny ways. (Any foreigner who's tried closing a business deal in China should be snickering knowingly right now.)

Hwang, who was born in Los Angeles, became the first Asian American to win a Tony Award when M. Butterfly won Best Play of 1988. Silverman, who is in China for the first time and calls the trip "life-changing," has directed two Pulitzer Prize finalists and, at the age of 31 in 2006, was one of the youngest women to direct on Broadway.

We spoke with the two yesterday.

What was your collaboration on Yellow Face like?

Hwang: Obviously it was a great collaboration because...

Silverman: ...now we're in China together!

Hwang: ...yes, we're doing our next show together, which is always a true sign of whether or not a collaboration has worked.

Leigh, are there differences in the way the two of you approach this project? It's been said that sometimes it takes an outsider's perspective to get the most accurate view of another culture.

Silverman: I really feel that my job here in China in relationship to the play is to get nuance, specificity and a depth of understanding that I never would by just reading a book or doing research on the Internet. I think that being here and smelling the air and being in the places and seeing the sights and talking to the people, there's just no replacement for that.

And I think that as a director it's actually your job to stay outside the story so you can go in and work on things, you can pull back, you can see things from a bird's eye point of view. So much of directing is really about perspective, and it's all about being able to narrow in on something very specific and very small, adjust or tweak something, then pull back and pull back and see the big picture.

David, what did you learn through the process of writing Yellow Face?

Hwang: Yellow Face was really for me a way of processing the last 20 years of my life and career and trying to look at what has come to be called multiculturalism -- so, what were some of the excesses, what was good in all of that, what was silly in all that? And I think at the end of Yellow Face, going through the process, I end up feeling that culture is very mutable and authenticity is a very nuanced idea. What is authentic Chinese culture? Well, it depends what period of time you're looking at, right? Culture lives, culture changes. And I think coming out of Yellow Face, I was at a point where I was ready to look at the future a bit more, and therefore the issue of US-China relations has become very interesting to me. What's going on now, how are people interacting now and how are things changing now?

At the end of Yellow Face, the main character (DHH, a stand-in for David Henry Hwang) says, "Maybe we should take words like 'Asian' and 'American,' like 'race' and 'nation' -- mess them up so bad no one has any idea what they even mean any more." Do you agree with this notion, or will racial (and cultural) differences in the future play out in more significant ways?

Hwang: I feel like the kind of utopian, post-racial view articulated in Yellow Face in the end is actually meant to be a little acknowledging of its own artificiality. There's a notion of a society past race -- of course it's a desirable thing and it's a wonderful goal -- (but we should) be aware of what's happening in the world now and recognize that's not where we are.

Silverman: I think that in a certain way the play is about perception and is also about where you are home. I think it's not so much about erasing the divide but acknowledging the divide (that makes the end of that play work), because DHH has spent most of the play trying to pretend that things are a certain way, and what Marcus' character (a Caucasian who DHH accidentally casts as an Asian) is allowed to say at the end is... he actually acknowledges the differences that DHH has spent much of the play trying to gloss over.

David, how do you feel on this trip, does China feel anything at all like home?

Hwang: Coming to China has never really felt like home to me in the way that I know some other Chinese Americans have articulated because in some ways coming to China makes me more aware of the ways in which I'm American. I'm not a part of this culture.

On the other hand, it's interesting to parse out things I grew up with, what are those influences that I may not have identified as Chinese but have gone into making me who I am. So I find it to be sort of a fascinating exploration.

This next question I almost hesitate to ask because it's so broad and in some ways impossible to answer, but on the subject of US-China relations, where do you think it will go, where do you want it go?

Silverman: I think David offers us a really unique perspective. What he just described is from the vantage point of someone who's insider and outsider in both countries, and I think that is the personal place from which he writes, and I also think that he is able to take those personal feelings of being both home and foreign and apply it to all sorts of different people and characters and situations in many of his plays.

What's interesting about the new play is that... there's a sense of a place on the verge of change; who's going to tell that story and who's going to be in charge of that change? I don't know that there's actually commentary that goes along with it in terms of judgment, but I do think what he's able to articulate for us is kind of a sense of disorientation, dislocation and confusion, and I think that provides quite a lot of humor -- it was the same in Yellow Face -- but also tells a very poignant story.

Hwang: And in terms of trying to predict the future, along with that confusion and dislocation and disorientation, I don't really know. I don't feel like I can predict where this relationship is going. And I think that's one of the reasons I wrote this play - I feel like US-China relations is going to be a big subject for me in the next arc of my work, and that this will probably be the first of several pieces on this subject. And through the larger project, I hope to come out with a sense of what is the real dynamic at work here, as you have one country that's the old superpower and another country that is becoming the next superpower. What dynamics are going to be at work in determining the future of that relationship? Your question is a good one; I don't know the answer to it, and I'm sort of writing to find out.

David Henry Hwang and Leigh Silverman speak at Capital M (3/F, 2 Qianmen Pedestrian Street) at 4 pm today (65 RMB, includes a drink).