M. Butterfly Essay | Critical Essay #3

M. Butterfly Critical Essay #3

Jan Herman provides an overview of Hwang's career and the plays that made it successful.

Being Asian-American has always been David Henry Hwang's stock in trade. Since the fall of 1978, when he wrote his first play, FOB, as a Stanford undergraduate and saw it open less than two years later at the prestigious New York Public Theater, the playwright has created a large and provocative body of work out of his highly charged sense of cultural identity.

Best known for M. Butterfly, the 1998 Tony-winning play of sexual deceit and romantic delusion that tapped into the troubled East-West history of race, ideology and alienation, Hwang has made his crucial theme the immigrant experience, a topic that has been at the heart of American theater in one way or another for nearly a century.

He's at it again with his latest play, Golden Child, a bittersweet memory...
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