PLAYWRIGHT BALANCES LIFE’S IMPROBABILITIES

“What does it mean to grow up in America with a color that’s not Caucasian?” asked David Henry Hwang, whose “Sound of a Voice” and “As the Crow Flies” open Sunday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

“To ignore that question is to ignore factors that shaped your personality, factors you’ve got to know before you know yourself.”

Hwang was addressing a theme of self-discovery that has gone hand in hand with his exploration of the theater. But he also was putting into perspective the underlying question of why it’s crucial for the American theater to make room wherever possible (and artistically feasible) for the work of minority artists.

It’s not as much an issue of artistic affirmative action as it is of opening the possibilities of theater; people who have different experiences offer different reflections of reality, present differing options for American drama and its 50-year-old struggle under naturalism’s lease.

Hwang has been offering his possibilities since 1980, when his first play, “F.O.B.,” which began as a Stanford dormitory project, opened at New York’s Public Theatre after having traveled through the O’Neill playwrights conference. (It won an Obie.)

“It’s about a Chinese immigrant related to an assimilated Chinese-American who in turn has a cousin who denies Chinese-ness,” he said. “It’s a comic triangle with a mythological subplot. . . . In general, I like to explore the mythical states that underlie reality.”

That may sound esoteric, and Hwang may sound a touch doctrinaire as well when he says: “It wasn’t until my freshman year that I became aware of racism and its effects on personality,” and “In order to be honest with yourself, you have to come to grips with the world you live in.”

But nothing of Hwang’s plays is so strident or difficult. For one thing, he’s forever alert to comic possibilities. For another, he has the ability to compress conventional categories of time and space, past and present, identity and culture, the here and the immaterial, into a swift theatrical shorthand.

His play “The Dance and the Railroad,” in which a Chinese dancer entrancingly is present at the site of an American 19th-Century railroad construction camp, drew positively rapt notices from New York critics who don’t have much to say for California writers, and an Obie for one of its performers, John Lone.

Hwang is an embodiment of a number of improbabilities. He’s a Chinese-American who grew up in the San Gabriel Valley in a family of Evangelical Christians. He was recruited by Harvard Boys School for his skills at debate. He was a violinist who went to Stanford to study law. He may never have come to the theater at all except that his dorm needed a theme show (hence “F.O.B.”).

The recently married Hwang, 28, still has the combination of an eager-to-please manner and a shyness often characteristic of high school students whose precocity has propelled them ahead of themselves. Several years of living in New York have not blunted his easy California buoyancy, that near guilelessness of having grown up in the sun.

“San Gabriel was pretty heterogeneous, but mostly Caucasian,” he said. “In school there were a lot of Asians and Hispanics. I didn’t have much ethnic consciousness at the time. I recognized I was Chinese, but it was no more different than having red hair. I guess there was a lot of racism, but if you’re happy-go-lucky, as I was then, you gloss things over.”

The high expectations of home life gave him plenty to work for, too. Hwang’s father, a certified public accountant, grew up in Shanghai and founded the Far East National Bank, the first federally chartered Asian-American bank in the United States. His Chinese mother grew up in the Philippines and came to the United States to study piano; she now teaches. Hwang has two younger sisters--one a cellist at Yale, the other a schoolteacher in Alhambra.

“I’d never seen a play until Susan Dietz, who was teaching English at Harvard, put on ‘Indians.’ I guess that got me started. I’ve never liked prose--the bulk of it is too much for me. I like the collaborative effort of stage that forces you to expand. And I like theater’s accessibility, which makes it easier to explore spiritual states, differing consciousnesses--though that sounds like nonsense.

“I was raised in the Evangelical Christian Church. I question some of its specific tenets, but not the presence of the supernatural in everyday life. Some things people question don’t strike me as strange at all. I grew up where someone could say, ‘Oh yes, she died but we prayed for her and she came back to life.’

“In my work I try to walk the fine line between the naturalistic and the surrealistic--something I think we all relate to, since we live day to day but are aware of forces larger than ourselves. It also allows for a lot of comedy--spiritual forces are so abstract that they create comic tensions in normality.

“I think there has to be something in your heart in order to explore something intellectually.” That’s the way Hwang describes his gradual attraction to the theater, aided by some courses with the author-scholar Martin Esslin, and a lot of spare time.

“I’ve written three plays about Chinese-American experience (‘F.O.B.,’ ‘The Dance and the Railroad,’ ‘Family Devotions’) and two plays set in Japan, ‘The House of Sleeping Beauties’ (an adaptation of the novel by Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata) and ‘The Sound of a Voice,’ which also has a suicide in it.

“ ‘Sound’ is about a warrior who goes into the woods to kill a witch and winds up falling in love with her. It feels like a traditional Japanese fable, but I made it up. A lot of the witch’s actions are open to interpretation, but it’s also a modern story. It says: ‘If you go into a relationship with a paranoid attitude, everything in it will turn to evil.’ ”

“Sound of a Voice” played in New York in 1983 on a double bill with “The House of Sleeping Beauties” (all of Hwang’s plays tend to be compact). “As the Crow Flies” is a new work (both are directed by Reza Abdoh).

“It’s essentially about a black woman who has two identities, one as a domestic and the other as an angel of death preparing an old Chinese woman for the next world. The Chinese woman thinks she’s real tough; she’s defeated ghosts before, and has plenty of elaborate rituals to keep death at bay.

“It’s another examination of the thing I’m aware of in all my work so far--there’s more to the world than we perceive with our five senses.”

Hwang has a new comedy, “Rich Relations,” opening in New York in April. He’s written a pilot for CBS about three generations of a Chinese family called “Good Fortune.” He has a screenplay pending, and is adapting Malraux’s “Man’s Fate” with composer Phillip Glass for an unspecified Broadway opening. In short, he’s never been busier.

But he ambled out of the restaurant, his hands buried in the pockets of his bulky woolen Japanese-style suit, with a placid, smiling expression that took in his surroundings. His conversation had evoked Shakespeare’s line, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy”; he looked like someone casually listening for what some of those things might be.