ACT I OF David Henry Hwang’s working day begins with no foreshadowing of the characters or the noise, the drama and the plot twists that may await him. Morning. Any weekday. The ground floor of a brownstone in the leafy, arty Brooklyn enclave known to its residents as Fort Greene. Hwang shares this home with the actress Kathryn Layng, his wife of more than 30 years; they have a grown son, Noah, and daughter, Eva, and a small, intermittently indignant dog, Dumpling. But when the curtain rises, he is alone in his roomy office, seated behind a desk wide enough to hold a large computer monitor and a stand for a yellow legal pad, but not deep enough to accommodate the clutter of potential distractions. He bought the desk in 2012 at an auction by the estate of Arthur Laurents, the legendarily irascible writer-director whose credits include the book for “Gypsy” (1959). Hwang never met him but loves the show. He used to wonder if Laurents would be pleased that another playwright is now using his desk. “Then I thought,” he says, “ ‘Wherever he is, he probably has other things to think about.’”
Hwang, 68, is methodical but also intuitive. He has many projects going at once and, in the absence of deadline pressure, gravitates toward whichever of them is tempting him. He has been at this long enough to know the conditions he needs to write: The beginning of the day is always best; background music is unhelpful, as is the conversational hum of a Starbucks. A private space — this private space — is essential. One wall of the office is covered with posters of his hits, his duds and his in-betweens, the brickwork of a life spent in theater. But from where he sits, he can, as long as he keeps his eyes on what’s directly in front of him, avoid having his attention diverted by all this evidence of his long history as a playwright.
His only real idiosyncrasy is that, while he writes, he likes to keep a small pillow in his lap. He thinks it’s a holdover from the time when, in the summer of 1978, before his senior year in college, he answered a newspaper ad that read, “Study playwriting with Sam Shepard,” and came briefly under the tutelage of both Shepard and the Cuban American experimental writer María Irene Fornés. Shepard, the dark cowboy poet of shaky American masculinity, and Fornés, whose work is often fragmentary, allusive and, like Shepard’s, allegorical, aren’t the central casting godparents you’d expect Hwang to have had, but he says their insistence that he write from parts of his mind he hadn’t yet explored helped him unlock “this sense of myself as a Chinese American, which I’d never thought was particularly important growing up in an assimilationist era.” They also made him “want to write when I was closest to the dream state.” That used to be late at night, in bed; now it’s at the start of the day, with the pillow as a sleep-adjacent transitional object.
Hwang says he usually has three or four hours of writing in him, a creditable stretch of work for any playwright, before he’s done what he can do and the rest of the day — Act II — starts yelping for his attention. Well into his fifth decade as a fixture of the New York stage, Hwang has traced a full arc from wunderkind to éminence grise. On the March day we meet near Lincoln Center for the first of several conversations, he’s on his way to Columbia University, where, for the past 10 years, he’s taught graduate classes in the playwriting program. He also serves on the Tony Awards Administration Committee and on the board of the Dramatists Guild Foundation; in the spring, he presided over the judges who selected the three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. This testifies in part to his deep knowledge of theater culture and his interest in new work, but also to the fact that his reputation for equanimity marks him as a playwright with whom everybody else in the business can stand to be in the same room.
The post How David Henry Hwang Remade Theater in His Own Image appeared first on New York Times.
