David Henry Hwang Honored As M. Butterfly Hits 20

As part of Monday night’s presentation of the annual Asian American Writers Workshop literary prizes, playwright David Henry Hwang was presented with a lifetime achievement award, and spoke about his groundbreaking M. Butterfly in an onstage interview that also included B.D. Wong, the star of the original 1988 production. We were lucky enough to speak with Hwang at a reception before the awards show proper, and he told us that he still hadn’t quite accepted that it had been twenty years since the play’s debut on Broadway. “In all the emails I sent to people telling them about tonight,” he confided, “after the ’20,’ I had to put a little exclamation mark in parentheses (!).” Before those first performances, he recalled, M. Butterfly was “generally considered to be a long shot,” and he laughed that the cast was running a pool on how many performances they’d get before it closed. Instead, the play opened a space in which other Asian American writers and actors could flourish. “It’s a much healthier situation now,” Hwang reflected, “that is able to show the community’s real diversity.”

(Wong confirmed the story about the pool, but added that every production goes through a similar phase. And when we remembered that it had been five years since his memoir, Following Foo, he gladly informed us that he was getting back into writing.)

This year’s AAWW awards went to novelist Mohsin Hamid (The Relucatant Fundamentalist), poet Sun Yung Shin (Skirt Full of Black) and journalist/historian Vijay Prashad (The Darker Nations).

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