David Henry Hwang

David Henry Hwang (born August 11, 1957) is an American playwright, librettist, screenwriter, and theater professor at Columbia University in New York City. He has won three Obie Awards for his plays FOB, Golden Child, and Yellow Face. Three of his works—M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, and Soft Power—have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Early life He was born in 1957 in Los Angeles, California, to Henry Yuan Hwang, the founder of Far East National Bank, and Dorothy Hwang, a piano teacher. The oldest of three children, he has two younger sisters. He received a bachelor's degree in English from Stanford University in 1979 and attended the Yale School of Drama between 1980 and 1981, taking literature classes. He left once workshopping of new plays began, since he already had a play being produced in New York. His first play was produced at the Okada House dormitory (named Junipero House at the time) at Stanford University after he briefly studied playwriting with Sam Shepard and María Irene Fornés. In summer 1978, he studied playwriting with Sam Shepard and attended Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, both of which led him to write his first plays such as FOB. Career Trilogy of Chinese America Hwang's early plays concerned the role of the Chinese American and Asian American in the contemporary world. His first play, FOB, explores the contrasts and conflicts between established Asian Americans and "Fresh Off the Boat" new 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. It won an Obie Award. Papp produced four more of Hwang's plays, including two in 1981: The Dance and the Railroad, which tells the story of a former Chinese opera star working as a coolie laborer in the 19th-century American West, and Family Devotions, a darkly comic take on the effects of Western religion on a Chinese-American family. This was nominated for the Drama Desk Award. Those three plays added up to what the author described as a "Trilogy of Chinese America."