David Henry Hwang Movies and Career Information

David Henry Hwang (黃哲倫 Pinyin: Huáng Zhélún) (born August 11, 1957) is an 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 the Yale School of Drama and Stanford University. His first play was produced at the Okada House dormitory at Stanford and he briefly studied playwriting with Sam Shepard and María Irene Fornés. Hwang's early plays concerned 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 the Joseph Papp 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.