This interview was originally recorded on October 18th, 2016.
The Oral History Project is supported by the Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Charitable Foundation.

David Henry Hwang, librettist

David Henry Hwang’s stage work includes the plays M. Butterfly, Chinglish, Yellow Face, Golden Child, The Dance and the Railroad, and FOB, as well as the musicals Aida, Flower Drum Song, Disney’s Tarzan, and Soft Power. Called America’s most-produced living opera librettist by Opera News, Hwang has written 13 libretti, including five with composer Philip Glass. An American Soldier (with Huang Ruo) received its New York premiere at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in May 2024, and Ainadamar (with Osvaldo Golijov) was seen at the Metropolitan Opera in fall 2024.

Hwang is a Tony Award winner and three-time nominee, a three-time Obie Award winner, a Grammy Award winner, and a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He is a professor at Columbia University School of the Arts.

Transcript

Marc A. Scorca: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to OPERA America and the National Opera Center. Today, our guest is a particularly successful librettist. He is a playwright, a screenwriter, a librettist, an essayist, a professor. He has played in the opera house on Broadway, off Broadway. In 1988, he was a winner of a Tony Award for M. Butterfly. He is none other than David Henry Wang. So, please join me in welcoming him to the stage here at the National Opera Center.

Marc A. Scorca: Welcome. We are so grateful that you're here. So tell me, who brought you to your first opera?

David Henry Hwang: Well, my mother was a pianist and my sister is a cellist, and so I grew up in a musical family, but it was primarily instrumental music. But my parents did bring me to the opera now and then as a kid, and I think one of the first operas I saw was actually Madam Butterfly.

Marc A. Scorca: And that was in Los Angeles?

David Henry Hwang: Yeah.

Marc A. Scorca: And that might have been what, the New York City Opera on tour, perhaps?

David Henry Hwang: I think so, because Los Angeles Opera didn't exist at the time. So, it must have been; I think it was at the Music Center, but not LA Opera.

Marc A. Scorca: And as a kid, did you take to it?

David Henry Hwang: Probably not particularly, no. Ironically working on M. Butterfly, my play, which was to a large extent a deconstruction of Madam Butterfly, but incorporated a lot of the Puccini music (was when I first took to it). So, listening to that at rehearsals, really kind of made me much more interested in conventional operatic form.

Marc A. Scorca: In looking at your career: you went to Stanford, you were an English major there. Then you went on to Yale to the School of Drama, but you left it, because already a play had been produced and you were workshopping something else. It is pretty remarkable how quickly you were having work produced on stage in New York. How did that come to be?

David Henry Hwang: Yeah, it's kind of a crazy way to start a career. I mean, very fortunate, obviously. So, a couple things happened. Number one, I wrote my first play when I was a senior at Stanford, as an undergraduate. And I wrote for it to be done in the lounge of my dorm. I realized that, through taking playwriting workshops with Sam Shephard and María Irene Fornés, I started realizing that there's a set of issues that I was interested in, that I didn't know I was interested in. So, I didn't start out wanting to be a playwright because I thought I was gonna write about somebody's Asian American and East-West issues that have ended up dominating a lot of my career. But, as I was studying with Sam and Irene, and we were writing more from our unconscious, these issues started appearing on the page. Things like clash of cultures, and immigration and assimilation. So, clearly some part of me was incredibly interested in these subjects, but my conscious mind hadn't figured that out yet. So, I went back to school for my senior year and (there's residential education at Stanford) I decided to live in the Asian American theme dorm. And so I decided to write a play that we could do in the lobby, which ended up being called FOB or Fresh Off the Boat. I then sent that to a number of places including the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, which happens every year in Waterford, Connecticut. And I was very fortunate that the show got selected as one of 12 plays to work on that year. But another thing that happened, was that a year prior, The Public Theater (and Joseph Papp, the founder, was still running it at that point), did a play called New Jerusalem by Len Jenkin, in which a Caucasian actor was cast in an Asian role, and this led to probably the first yellowface protest in New York theater, and Joe Papp being who he was, he invited the protestors into his office and ended up hiring one of them with a brief to find plays for Asian actors. And it was just about that time that my play came across their desk. So, I'm really the beneficiary of affirmative action, because that's really what affirmative action does. It Identifies a social need and then tries to create a program to address it. And I'm the guy who got to walk through that door.

Marc A. Scorca: It's an absolutely remarkable story. And yet, there are some lessons in that. Our good friend, the soprano, Lauren Flanagan, always reminds us that 'every room is a theater'. Every room is a performance space. And you made that the case at Stanford. You created, and you had a space, and in the dormitory you did it.

David Henry Hwang: Yeah. I mean, I just thought, even as a kid, it was just important to see the work produced. And that means if I have to do it in my dorm and direct it myself and use kids from the dorm, who'd never acted before as the performers, that's what we did.

Marc A. Scorca: And how did you learn about the Eugene O'Neill (Theater) Center?

David Henry Hwang: I was interested enough in becoming a playwright that I started to just kind of try to be aware of what was out there. And, at the time, Theatre Communications Group, which was the national organization of not-for-profit theaters published a guide every year. I can't remember what it was called - maybe they still do it - for all the not-for-profit theater organizations. So, I flipped through that. It was pre-internet. And this seemed to be an organization where you could be a playwright, without an agent and send an unsolicited manuscript to them, and they would actually take it seriously.

Marc A. Scorca: So seek out the opportunities because they may be there.

David Henry Hwang: Yeah. I think it's important to do some research on places that you are interested in pursuing, and just make sure that it seems like a good fit for whatever your circumstance is.

Marc A. Scorca: And incredible professors at Stanford; to study with Sam Shephard, to study with Irene Fornés,

David Henry Hwang: I actually didn't study with them at Stanford because Stanford didn't have a playwriting program. But I did, and this is now going back a couple years to when I was a sophomore, I just started writing plays in my spare time, and I found a professor, named John L'Heureux, who's a novelist, who ran the Creative Writing Department. And he had taught it. I'd taken a class from him in contemporary drama. So, I showed him some of these plays that I'd been writing, and he told me that they were really bad, which they were. My problem was that I wanted to write plays, but I didn't actually know anything about the theater. But John was a good guy, and together, we kind of designed a playwriting major, and I ended up seeing as many plays and reading as many plays as I could. And that became the bulk of my education. And then the summer before my senior year in college, I saw an ad in the LA Times calendar that said, 'Study Playwriting with Sam Shepherd'. And it became the first year of what eventually was a pretty prominent event in Southern California called the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival. But this was only the first year that they ever tried to do it. So, there were only two of us that applied to be students, so we both got in, and that's why I met Sam and Irene and got to study with them.

Marc A. Scorca: It kind of proves the Malcolm Gladwell adage about 10,000 hours, that you had this sense of wanting to be a playwright and you just started writing plays.

David Henry Hwang: Yeah. If you wanna be a writer, you have to write. And so that's the most important prerogative. I don't know that I really had written for 10,000 hours, however, by the time I wrote my first play.

Marc A. Scorca: More or less.

David Henry Hwang: The important thing is to do it.

Marc A. Scorca: So, your work as a playwright: you're writing plays, you're just reading every play you can, you're seeing as much as you can. What drew you into opera? I know that The Dance and the Railroad in 1981 tells the story of a Chinese opera star, but that's not European opera, although it's a first cousin. What began to draw you to opera by 1992? You have The Voyage with Philip Glass at The Met. How did that bridge happen?

David Henry Hwang: I'd always been interested in, what in the 1970s was called Theatricalism, that is trying to utilize all of the different things that theater, I think, does better than other mediums, not only in terms of the drama and dialogue and all that, but also explicitly theatrical representations like dance and music and, in my case, Chinese opera. So, I'm sort of interested in a more theatricalized form of presentation in general. And then of course, with M. Butterfly, riff off a European opera, specifically the Puccini piece. And then really, it was Philip Glass, who even before M. Butterfly, had seen some of my early one acts at The Public Theater, and got in touch with me and asked if I wanted to collaborate on a piece. And now that several decades have gone by, and I am older now than Philip was when he first asked me to work with him, I've taken that as a really great lesson that, as you get older and you become a mid-career artist or a late-career artist, it's a wonderful resource to work with younger artists, because they bring in a different kind of energy, a different level of even ambition, that continues to kind of refresh one's own creative instincts and ways of working. So, Philip asked me to work with him, and we ended up creating a piece. The first thing we did was more a musical theater piece than a proper opera called 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, which was kind of about UFO abductions, pre X-Files. And then that led to The Voyage at The Met, which was obviously a proper, full grand opera. And then at that point, I became one of the few people who had some experience creating opera libretti, and then other people started to ask me to do it. And I just kind of fell into it.

Marc A. Scorca: You're right. Today, the world of the opera librettist is more populated by far than it was. And there are a number of people who are pretty good at it. But it is only recently that we've had a number of go-to librettists. You're very right. When you came into it, there just weren't many people to go to.

David Henry Hwang: Which is, by the way, of course, a reflection of the fact that there's so much more activity in new opera now than there was 20, 30 years ago.

Marc A. Scorca: We just did a quick study and just about 35-40% of our opera companies in the United States did either a new work or an American work last season; there's just an enormous amount of productivity in new opera. And of course, it winds up training librettists as well as composers. And you talk about M. Butterfly as being a kind of deconstruction of Madama Butterfly - we'll talk about that in a second. When you started it though, were you actually seeking to create something just based on the life of Bernard Boursicot, and then realized that it was going to be a kind of take on Madama Butterfly, or did you set out to do a take on Madama Butterfly?

David Henry Hwang: No. So, for those of you who don't know the story of M. Butterfly, it's based on the true story of a French diplomat who had a 20 year affair with a Chinese actress, who turned out to be a) a spy and b) a man, disguised as a woman. And the diplomat claimed that he never knew the true gender of his lover. So that seemed to me to be a very interesting subject for play.

Marc A. Scorca: It's an interesting subject for a life.

David Henry Hwang: So then, I thought about the story for a few months and one day - I was living in Los Angeles at the time, and I was driving around and I thought, "Oh, what did this diplomat think that he'd found?" And the answer came into my head, "Oh, he probably thought he'd found his version of Madam Butterfly, his butterfly". And at that point, the notion of sort of dovetailing the plot of the spy story and the plot of Madam Butterfly seemed to be an interesting way to get at this tale. So, Madam Butterfly was the sort of device that I came up with, in order to find what I hope would be an interesting way to look at the Boursicot story.

Marc A. Scorca: So, story first, and it came to you, this intersection between the story and Madama Butterfly. And yet, in a way, you turn Madama Butterfly upside down in terms of the power dynamics...

David Henry Hwang: Right. And that's sort of the fun of it. And when I came up with this idea of dovetailing the two stories, the structure that I thought of (in a very broad sense) was that at the beginning of the play, the diplomat would fantasize that he was Pinkerton. And that by the end of the play, the diplomat would realize it's actually he who was Butterfly, and that it was he who was deceived by love, and the Chinese spy who perpetrated that deceit was therefore the real Pinkerton. So once you have that structure, it then implies certainly a shift in power balance and flipping the Butterfly mythology on its head.

Marc A. Scorca: You also kind of did a rewrite of Aida.

David Henry Hwang: Yeah.

Marc A. Scorca: And what was that like, approaching another standard piece here, you're not creating a new work that is flavored by references to the old work, but you're actually taking an old work (a masterpiece of literature) and reworking it?

David Henry Hwang: Right. That was a very different process, because that was produced by Disney Theatricals. It was a Disney musical on Broadway that Elton John did the music to, and Tim Rice did the lyrics. And it already existed in a form by the time I was hired on as the script doctor for that. But the interesting thing I think about the intersection between operatic stories and musicals is that it is not at all uncommon for musicals to be based on operas. One of the main examples is Rent, which was based on La Bohème. What is unusual is that you usually change the name and we struggled for a while. We were gonna call it 'Elaborate Lives'. There were a number of other titles that were running around. And ultimately, we couldn't come up with something that we liked better than Aida, so we kept the title. But a lot of the structures of these classic operatic works, they've got good bones, and you can really take them, you can do a lot with the story. So, that was something that I didn't initiate, but it was really fun to come on and try and see what we could take from the Verdi opera. And if anything, I would say the musical Aida ends up spending a lot of time telling the backstory of Verdi's Aida, because Verdi's Aida basically begins with Radamès going, "Wow, I've got this big problem. I'm in love with my slave girl". And it's a very interesting question, like, "Well, how did that happen?" And so, in the musical Aida, act one is essentially how that relationship came to be, and then act two is the consequence of it.

Marc A. Scorca: I still want to commission a whole series of operas that are the sequels, you know, what happens to Rodolfo after...?

David Henry Hwang: I'm surprised actually, that hasn't been done. There's a Hedda Gabler sequel that'll be on Broadway this season, which is a play...

Marc A. Scorca: What is it that opera allows you to do dramatically, theatrically, the theatricalism? What does opera allow you to do that you can't do in any other form?

David Henry Hwang: Well, I think opera is the most theatrical form, because you are dealing with a form that inherently announces that it is elevated from what we normally think of as reality, simply by virtue of the fact that everybody's singing all the time. And in real life, we don't do that. Musicals, of course, are in the middle there, because musicals usually have a book. So they usually have people talking, and then all of a sudden people burst into song. And as Oscar Hammerstein said, "People start singing when words are no longer sufficient". So, in a musical, you were using music to express the most emotional moments. But in opera, everybody sings all the time. And that automatically kind of notches up the degree to which you are already living in an elevated story world. I mean, there are a number of things that are fun about writing opera libretti, but one of the fun things is that the audience is very accepting of story points that are fantastic. And things that might be melodramatic if put into simply spoken prose are all of a sudden kind of so emotionally rich. And we buy them and we feel these things, and we feel them as much, because of the structure of the libretto, and what happens when the soprano hits the high C. A lot of times even the particular words that they're singing, as evidenced by the fact that many times we are listening to an opera in another language, and we kind of know what's going on, but we don't exactly know what's going on.

Marc A. Scorca: But we get it anyway.

David Henry Hwang: Yeah.

Marc A. Scorca: So, given the fact that it is this heightened theatricality, where people are accepting almost a parallel reality, because it's the reality where everyone sings, do you write your words differently for an opera libretto than you would do for a play or a musical?

David Henry Hwang: Well, I think yes, but there are a set of reasons why writing an opera libretto is different from writing a play or a musical. And one of them has to do with the issue of heightened reality. But there's a couple things that tend to be a little more in the forefront of my mind. First of all, it, I work in a number of different forms. I write plays, I write musicals, you know, TV, whatever. And part of going into any particular form, is knowing what artist holds the primary creative vision in that form, and then the other artists are supporting that. So, if I write a play, I'm the main guy and everybody's trying to support my vision. If I write a movie, it's the director. If I work on a TV show, it's the showrunner. And when I work on an opera, I feel like the composer is the primary artist. So, what that means in terms of the libretto is that, yes, I'm trying to create something that's a good story and has good characters and all that, but I'm also trying to create something that's going to help the composer do his or her best work. And that means going into the process with trying to understand what it is that's going to push the composer's buttons. At this point, there're composers I've worked with before, so I know their work and I know how they think, kind of. But with a new composer who I haven't worked with before, a lot of times it involves spending just time together and understanding what it is that they want, what excites them. For instance, I wrote an opera for the Argentinian Israeli American composer, Osvaldo Golijov called Ainadamar, which was about (Federico) García Lorca - Lorca's death. And it became clear to me after a while of spending time with Osvaldo that he really liked blood and passion and not a lot of dialogue. Like he didn't wanna have a lot of scenes where characters were talking to each other. So, that implied for Ainadamar, we kind of created a sort of triptych of images that would have a lot of people talking about things that happened or talking about things that they were feeling; there was sort of a lot of parallel and intersecting arias. Or, when I was working with Unsuk Chin - we did an opera based on Alice in Wonderland, and we'll be doing the sequel - it's looking like at Covent Garden in a few years. And with Unsuk, I was trying to figure out - I was flying to Berlin, I was spending time with her, we were having a great time, but I kept trying to figure out "Why do you wanna do Alice?" Like, is it the fantasy aspect? Is it the Freudian aspect? Is it an empowering girl thing? You know, what is it? And eventually I realized, she sort of said to me, "Oh, well, if I could use a phone book as a libretto, I would", because she didn't want the words to get too much in the way of the music. She wanted the music to carry the dramatic action. So what that said to me was, "Okay, the reason she's attracted to Alice is because of the absurdity in the material". Not so much a kind of linear narrative. And once I knew that, then I feel I was able to create something that worked for her. So I think the primary thing to me is oddly not the elevation of reality, as much as it is trying to figure out what's gonna serve the composer. And another thing is just the quality of the words, in terms of having a certain meter, having a certain musicality/rhythm to them. And then, again, you have to watch where you put your vowels. And those are the two kind of technical things that tend to be in the forefront of my mind.

Marc A. Scorca: In 2005, Toni Morrison was the keynote speaker for us at our annual conference that year, and she had just done her first libretto, and she read for us some of her poetry, and then read for us some of her libretto to illustrate the opacity of her poetry, the density of her poetry. But what she tried to do in her libretto was to, as she said, "Leave room for music". So do you think about leaving room for music?

David Henry Hwang: Yes, I think that's super important, and I guess that's it. Thank you for bringing that up, because I haven't mentioned just the economy that's necessary in a libretto. So, a play needs to be fairly economical, because it's a time arc. So, it's not like a novel where the audience goes through it at their own pace. And so we are all sitting, watching a play together, and we can't speed it up as an audience member, so when things get boring, the audience gets restless. So, as a playwright, I try to be economical with my words, but you have to be so much more economical in an opera, simply by virtue of the fact that it just takes longer to sing 'I love you', than to say, 'I love you', so you have that many fewer words to work with. I think there's a danger in writing libretti that you can, if you have too many words - it forces the composer just to kind of set words to music. I mean, the composer just really having to work to get all the words in. Whereas I think a good opera needs to be able to kind of breathe musically. You need to have passages where there isn't a lot of text going on. And then the other thing, I guess that I haven't mentioned also is trying to think of, "Oh, it might be fun to have a duet here, it might be fun to have a trio; How are we gonna end? How are we gonna use the chorus?" So, just as a librettist, I take stabs at that sort of thing. And then ultimately it's up to the composer, but at least somebody's gotta go first.

Marc A. Scorca: Do you find that you're also working in part as the dramaturg, since you have undoubtedly more theatrical experience than the composers you are working with?

David Henry Hwang: Yeah, I think that that is what a part of the function of doing the libretto is - creating the dramaturgy of the opera. And yes, for the most part, first time opera composers tend to have more experience writing for instruments than for the voice.

Marc A. Scorca: Or songs, short form.

David Henry Hwang: And certainly not a lot of experience in theatrical form, or creating theatrical form. And then you find some that catch on really quickly. I've done two shows now with Bright Sheng, and I think that by the time we got to second show, I was like, "We're gonna create the structure together, as I couldn't figure out how to do it". And Bright had a vision on how to do it. But also I trusted, based on the first show that we did, that he had really good dramaturgical instincts.

Marc A. Scorca: And what makes a good composer partner for you?

David Henry Hwang: I think it's really good when a composer has an opinion about what he or she wants to do with the story, because I feel that it's important for a composer to have an investment, not only in the music per se, but in how the music interacts with story. And even if it's Unsuk, that she doesn't really want to deal with story, because she wants the music to carry the dramatic movement. That's an opinion. It's a little different than what I was used to. But it's a point of view. And if the composer has a point of view, then I feel like we can go back and forth, and we can argue about things, and we can compromise about things. We can make decisions, see if they work, and then if they don't work, make a different decision. So, I like that. I think that it means that we're really engaging with each other and trying to be two people who are eventually, hopefully doing an artistic mind-meld, and creating something that is a child of us both.

Marc A. Scorca: Sometimes in my interviews, I hear composers who say, "I got so-and-so's libretto, and I loved it, and I just started setting it". And yet, I then go back and I read some of the Verdi correspondence to either (Arrigo) Boito or (Antonio) Ghislanzoni and you see volumes, a thousand pages of letters. It's like, "No, I need something that's shorter, faster"... that the opera went through a crucible of debate between the librettist and the composer.

David Henry Hwang: I think that's great, because it means that the composer is investing in theatrical form.

Marc A. Scorca: How is the for-profit creative process different from the nonprofit creative process, the commercial versus the nonprofit?

David Henry Hwang: In theater-theater, as opposed to opera - some people think for better, some people think for worse - but there is a very close alliance at the moment between the so-called not-for-profit theater and the commercial theater, where most things get developed and premiere in a not-for-profit environment, and then a commercial producer will decide 'Maybe this could be commercial', and then move it to Broadway or whatever. And the reverse can happen too, where a commercial producer will have a project, take it to a not-for-profit theater; the not-for-profit theater will do it first. So, that alliance means that there's not a heck of a lot of difference between working commercially and working not-for-profit. If you go into what could be called 'corporate theater', which would be working on a Disney musical, again the process of working is not that different. The goal is to try to create something that gonna sell a lot of tickets, and that people are going to like and that will be a commercial success. But I think what's great actually is that there's no real rule about what's gonna be successful; you don't know? So, you just have to make it the same way you would make everything else. You just try to make the best show that you can. And then you try to learn from an audience during previews, and you adjust things. I do that for my own plays and at The Public Theater, so I don't think there's a huge difference. What I would say is a little different when it comes to opera, is that you don't have a preview process. So, when you do a play or a musical, there's a point when you bring it in front of an audience and you do eight shows a week, and - depending on the budget of the show, if you do a musical, you might be in previews for three to four weeks. I think Spider-Man was in previous for six months or something. And you listen to the audience every night and you try to understand what the audience is telling you, that is, 'I thought this was funny', but nobody's laughing. It's not the audience's fault, it's something we're not doing well. You learn from the audience and you adjust. You do rewrites; you change the staging, whatever. In opera, because you only have so many performances - you've got maybe six performances, if you're lucky for the opera, so you have no previews. What people try to do nowadays is workshops, and that helps. But what's very helpful, and I've had the chance to do it a couple times, is a piece that gets done someplace and then gets done someplace else. So with Ainadamar, for instance, we did it at Tanglewood. We got a sense of what was working and what wasn't working, and then we were able to rework it for its full production at The Santa Fe Opera. So, I think this co-production thing in terms of new opera is often very helpful to the creative team.

Marc A. Scorca: I want to chat about the source material, because a lot of the work that you've done is about the Chinese American or Asian American experience, informed by your own personal impressions, personal life story. And one thing that's come up, because there is so much new creation going on in American Opera, and people are telling the stories through opera that matter to them, but sometimes they are telling stories that aren't naturally theirs. They're grabbed by a Chinese American story, but they're not, in any way, Chinese American. Do you have any issues about who has the right to tell whose stories?

David Henry Hwang: I believe that anybody has the right to tell any story. What I will say though, is that anybody who doesn't like it has the right to criticize that. As someone who is Chinese American who often writes about Chinese or Chinese American subjects, I'm used to getting a fair amount of criticism often from other Asian Americans. And I remember when we first did that play, FOB at The Public Theater, there was an Asian American publication out of San Francisco that said I had set Asia America back 20 years. And I was really only 22 at the time. So, you get used to the fact that the people about whom you're writing, particularly when it's a group that's not usually represented, are of course going to be the people who have the greatest investment in it. And I actually think that that dialogue is a good thing. Of course, I don't like when people don't like my work, but in the larger picture, it's important that people come out and engage and say what they feel, and say what they like, because that's an important function that an audience serves. So, when you end up writing about a culture that is not something that you grew up in, and then people criticize that, the problem is when the creators therefore get really defensive and all of a sudden, the creators may start to feel that they're being censored. And that's not censorship, that's critique. And I feel like that we have a tendency in this culture to feel that you can say any terrible thing you want about a work aesthetically, and it is not censorship, but when you start to critique content, then all of a sudden there's this unease about, "Oh well, are my rights as a creator being violated?" And no, they're not. So, I think it's okay to write about anything that you wanna write about, and I think doing research and knowing what you're writing about is a good idea, and then there are gonna be people who don't like it. Listen and don't be defensive about it.

Marc A. Scorca: But you raised a very good point that even if you are of the community, you're still gonna get criticism because people see it differently. That's just part of putting yourself out there.

David Henry Hwang: Yeah. Because there are no monolithic communities, and it's very easy when we look at the other, (whoever we identify as the other), to start to assume that, you know one thing about them and therefore you know about the entire group. And I think, for instance, as progressives and as liberals, it's easy sometimes to look at evangelicals and go, "Oh, evangelicals are monolithic". But anytime you go into a particular community, a particular culture, and you really get to know them, it's very rare that they are monolithic. There's usually a multiplicity of points of view. And so, that means when you are of a community and you're writing, there are gonna be people whose experiences you aren't portraying. And when you're writing about a community or people or a culture, whatever, that is not your own, it's easy to make generalizations based on a little bit of knowledge, and assume that you are therefore able to have a handle on the whole culture.

Marc A. Scorca: In opera, we have this growing challenge, if you will, where we're doing so much new work, and so much of the new work really resonates with the world we live in. It accesses community discussion about important topics. And if you then put that side by side in a season with works from the middle or late part of the 19th century, those works frequently have a different point of view. It's a very Eurocentric view of otherness. One could argue that a lot of the works are very sexist, if not misogynistic, and there are views of other cultures that are not at all consistent with the way we talk or think today. What do we do with those works?

David Henry Hwang: I like to think there's sort of a natural attrition process that takes place, when works kind of fall out of being relevant to a contemporary audience. There is a series that's done in New York every year called Encores at City Center, that basically takes up older musicals, musicals that have been forgotten and does them in concert versions. And one of the most prominent examples of that was the revival of Chicago, the (John) Kander and (Fred) Ebb musical, which then moved to Broadway, and it's still playing today, whatever, a dozen years later. So, a lot of times with the Encores musicals, the books get revised, and the wonderful playwright, David Ives, who has done a number of those revisions, once said, "Well, the first thing that you have to do is take out all the wife-beating jokes". So, there comes a point as culture moves along, that something which was once acceptable, the ick factor just becomes too high. And I think that these things will play out over time in terms of audiences, just at a certain point, feeling that the works aren't relevant, or feeling that the libretto is no longer relevant. But despite that, the music is still important enough that this work feels like something we still wanna see. I think these are the debates that we're having right now, and I don't subscribe to the term 'political correctness'. I don't think it's about political correctness trying to weed out musicals or operas. I think it's about the culture as a whole deciding, are there too many wife-beating jokes in this show? And if there are, it doesn't feel like it relates to me anymore.

Marc A. Scorca: Or the way one approaches it directorially, or design-wise, or costuming may move you beyond some of the stereotypes that are embedded in it.

David Henry Hwang: Yes. I think there are ways to address some of these things through the productions. And I think that there are directors who understand some of these issues and are interested in them and are concerned with how a particular work might be starting to become irrelevant, who find fresh ways to approach it. And all of a sudden, we see it anew.

Marc A. Scorca: Dream of the Red Chamber, your latest opera, as far as I know. It just opened in September in San Francisco, and it blasted through every box office goal they had. I know that it just attracted a great audience to the Opera House. We featured it in our orchestral showcase last year; you were watching some of it on the screen as people came into the hall. A sprawling work. Could you give us just a little background about the importance of that work within the Chinese community, and then how you tamed it to make it into an opera?

David Henry Hwang: We hope we tamed it. So, this is based on what many people will say is the greatest Chinese novel in history. Dream of the Red Chamber, or Story of the Stone, which is, when we say 'tamed it', it's because it's a work that is about twice as long as War and Peace, has about 500 characters. And it's so revered in Chinese culture, that there is an entire school of academic study, Redology, which is devoted simply to studying this one work. So, originally this project to turn it into an opera, was the dream of an organization in Minneapolis called the Chinese Heritage Foundation. And they decided to try to create this opera. You look back on this, and it really seemed unlikely that this would ever happen.

Marc A. Scorca: An odd place for a work to start.

David Henry Hwang: Right? a) It happened in Minneapolis, but b) The idea that a bunch of Chinese people in Minneapolis who didn't have a lot of experience in opera decided that this was something that they wanted to make happen, and the likelihood was that you'd go, "Wow, well, they're really well-meaning, and they seem great, but it's not actually gonna become a major opera". But they were determined and they were smart. So, they went to Kevin Smith, who used to run Minnesota Opera. They brought him on as a consultant, and Kevin got them to David Gockley at San Francisco Opera. David became very interested in this and suggested Bright Sheng as the composer. Bright and I had done an earlier piece called The Silver River, and we'd been looking for something else to do together. So, Bright approached me to do the libretto, and I said no.

Marc A. Scorca: For the obvious reasons?

David Henry Hwang: Because I was like, "I don't know how to do this". This just seems like an impossible task, not only in terms of trying to wrangle this material into a two-and-a- half hour opera, but also because it's so revered in Chinese culture, it just feels like no matter what we do, people are gonna criticize us, so why would I wanna get involved with this? But, you know, I like to say that Bright grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution, and I grew up in Los Angeles, so his will is stronger than mine. And Bright eventually convinced me to do it, but really the main way he convinced me to do it, was that he had a vision on how to tell the story. There are many challenges in this adaptation, but I'd say the primary challenge is how do you boil it down to: what is the core story? What is the story you're gonna tell? And Bright had a vision on how to do this, so I therefore felt, "Okay, I'll do it, but you have to be the co-librettist", because when you create an opera, certainly the structure is at least half the job. So yeah, "I'll write the words that they actually sing, but you are largely gonna be responsible for the structure here, so let's do it together". And once we agreed to do that, then it was a fun project to do. After that we brought on Stan Lai (Sheng-chuan) who is arguably the most beloved playwright/director in the Chinese speaking world to direct the show at San Francisco Opera, and Tim Yip as the designer. Tim is best known here in the West for having won an Oscar for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. So, both Bright and Stan had very long and deep histories with Dream of the Red Chamber, which I did not. So again, I felt like I wanted to collaborate with people who had a deeper understanding of the work than me. And it was fun that this core creative team that we're all Chinese, but we're all different kinds of Chinese, and therefore my point of view was more the superficial ignorant American view. And I don't think I would have done it if I hadn't had collaborators who had a deeper understanding of the work than me.

Marc A. Scorca: Wow, and it is just a wonderful, luscious work, and a really beautiful piece.

David Henry Hwang: Thank you. I think it turned out quite well. And we're taking it to Hong Kong in March, and then I think we're looking to see if we can bring it to the mainland, which would probably require translating the libretto back into Chinese, which would be an interesting thing.

Marc A. Scorca: Two more questions. One, as you look at American opera, and if you could write a prescription for American opera to increase its engagement, its effectiveness as a 21st century art form in this country, what would you write in that prescription?

David Henry Hwang: First of all, I feel like this division between high culture and popular culture, I think, is pretty arbitrary. And I don't think it serves us well in the 21st century, that we kind of categorize certain works as being more important, because they have this greater artistic value and then other works, which attract a larger audience seem somehow less important artistically. I think that's kind of silly. And as someone who works on a number of different forms, I don't feel like I approach writing a Disney musical any differently really, than I approach writing a Philip Glass libretto. It's just about trying to create the best story you can. And yes, there are different rules in the different mediums, but that doesn't have anything to do with how one approaches the piece. So, that's one thing. I think it's important to try to break this down, the difference. And I feel like at some point, there will be a new opera, which gets a commercial transfer. When Baz Luhrmann did Bohème on Broadway, 10-12 years ago, I like that in resetting opera as being a more populous form. Now, obviously Broadway is quite elitist to begin with, so there's that, but at least I think it breaks it down, to some degree, and I think there should be a new opera at some point, especially given the fact that you have (Stephen) Sondheim being done at opera houses now. You have that division falling away anyway, so I think that's one thing. And the other I do think involves this question of what's called inclusion and diversity. And I guess it's not surprising that my entire career started because of affirmative action, so to speak, and because of yellowface casting, and this continues to be an issue that I care about. For me it's not about, "Okay, we have to cast Asians as Asian characters per se", because people will go, "Oh, but what about acting?" And yes, it is ultimately about acting and it is about the quality of the performance. But I think if you look at the statistics, (and I don't have statistics for opera, I only have statistics for New York theater, for Broadway shows, and the 16 major not-for-profit theaters in New York City) and you look at who gets cast, generally over the last six or seven years, the cast of shows have been roughly 80% white. So, that means only 20% of the people who are being cast are People of Color. And in a country where People of Color are going to be the majority in about 20 or 30 years, it's just a bad business model. You can argue that it's about the social justice side of it, and I think that's important too, but it just doesn't make sense in terms of trying to appeal to future audiences. So, that's why I am interested in a certain amount of aesthetic inconsistency. I like it when an actor of color gets cast in a so-called white part because that increases the 20%. But I don't like it when the reverse happens because that decreases the 20%. And I think that is good, not only for social justice reasons, but for the health of the form in America and in the world, both in theater and in opera as we go further into the 21st century.

Marc A. Scorca: Well, that was just phenomenally insightful, and I really appreciate your sharing that. Are there questions (from the audience?)

Audience member #1: I'm wondering for Dream of the Red Chamber, how did you control the translation, 'cause the original version is German language?

David Henry Hwang: No. I, at any rate, used the (David) Hawkes translation, 'cause my Chinese sucks basically. So, that's how we worked the translation thing. My collaborators could all read it in Chinese.

Marc A. Scorca: It's the librettist who couldn't read it. How do you teach libretto-writing, for that matter playwriting? I was chatting with Carlisle Floyd here on this stage, and he said, "I can't give a young composer an ear. What they hear, the way they hear things is up to them. I can teach them harmony, I can teach them structure". What can you teach in terms of libretto or playwriting?

David Henry Hwang: Well, you can't teach. I mean, you can't teach talent. You can try to help every writer become the best writer that they can. And for me, yes, there's some basic (principles). I think it's important to read a lot, to understand structure, to see a lot. My education (was) read as many plays and see as many places as you can, because it helps you to understand how everybody's done it before. And we don't have to invent the wheel every time we set out to create something. So, it's really useful to know what other people have done and essentially what you wanna borrow from or steal, if you wanna put it that way, and what you don't like. So, that's important. And then I think it's just a question of...there's some exercises, like the exercises that I did with Sam and Irene, and then looking at the work that people do, looking at the student's work and going into it and taking it apart and saying what makes sense, what doesn't make sense, and essentially doing what the audience does in a preview. When we're in the back of the theater and we're listening to the audience during a preview, we're trying to understand what is an audience receiving from the work? And as a teacher, I think you can also articulate what it is that you've received. 'I didn't understand this part'. 'This character's journey really drew me in'. 'This character, I couldn't follow'. And that therefore, you serve as kind of a mirror of the play to the author. And then maybe sometimes, suggest some things that they could do, but I'm wary about that because, in general, the task is to teach the author how to find a way to best say what they wanna say, as opposed to me, the teacher going, "Well, this is how I would rewrite it", because it's not my play, it's not my libretto.

Marc A. Scorca: If a young librettist said, "I really want to explore libretto-writing, do you have two or three favorite libretti that you would say, 'go read this libretto, come back and tell me what you think about it'".

David Henry Hwang: I think any libretto and any play is useful. Because even if you don't like it, you've learned what you don't like. Now, it's always nice to go read Puccini and read Verdi and Wagner and all that, and it's really useful to read modern libretti, because they're really different. If you read the libretto to Einstein (on the Beach), it's just a little tricky to know what you're reading, but that's useful too, because - like the conversation I had with Unsuk - the libretto for Einstein is kind of like putting the phone book to music, and that can work. And it's important to know that as well.

Marc A. Scorca: (invites a question from the audience)

Audience member #2: As a librettist writing in English for an American audience, how do you feel about supertitles?

David Henry Hwang: I like supertitles because I wrote the words, and I think it's nice if the audience knows what they are. So, I have to say that when I worked with Osvaldo on Ainadamar, because I wrote it in English and then Osvaldo translated it into Spanish, and so I was listening to the opera in a language that I didn't understand, it felt like, "Oh, this is like a real opera". So, that's kind of fun too.

Marc A. Scorca: That's funny. (accepts another audience question)

Audience member #3: My question really is...you had mentioned that you usually have the composer as the one leading the piece. When you have an idea of your own, when you bring it to a composer, you already have words - how do you make your words fit with what you think this composer might respond to?

David Henry Hwang: Thanks. I've actually never done that. I've never initiated an opera project. In the same way, and I guess this is worth talking about too with libretti, I've never worked on an opera where the music came before the words, which would, by the way, of course, be much more difficult.

Marc A. Scorca: And which is fairly rare.

David Henry Hwang: So, all the operas that I've done, a) iI was a project that the composer brought to me, and b) The libretto came first. And look, never say 'never'. And it's always possible that at some point I might come up with an idea where I'm like, "This really has to be an opera". But up to now, I have not been inclined to do that for the very reason that I think it's primarily a composer's form, and if I have an idea that's very personal, I tend to do it as a play.

Marc A. Scorca: Interesting. But if you had an idea that you thought was operatic, you probably wouldn't bring the libretto to the composer, you'd bring the idea to the composer to see if the composer could own it with you.

David Henry Hwang: Exactly, yes. If that situation came about, then I would want us to create it together as opposed to having a libretto already written.

Marc A. Scorca: (takes another audience question)

Audience member #4: I wonder if you have a feeling for the evolving nature of boundaries between musical theater and opera.

David Henry Hwang: Yeah, I think this relates a little to the comment that I made earlier about the blurring of lines between so-called high culture and so-called popular culture. And as I was saying a moment ago, the fact that you have Sweeney Todd (being) done in a fair number of opera houses now...

Marc A. Scorca: And Rodgers and Hammerstein too...

David Henry Hwang: Right, and that you might see Oklahoma? So, I think that that blurring is already taking place. What we haven't had a lot of yet, or anything at all really is the reverse - a new opera which then ends up going into Broadway or into musical theater, and I am hopeful that that will happen, and I think it's an important development.

Marc A. Scorca: Interesting. Well, it is just wonderful to hear your brilliant articulation of your approach to the art form, to your many art forms. We're so honored that you've been with us tonight.