M. as in Metamorphosis

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 1988 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 piece based on his own family’s history. But this time, it may be that he has written with more deeply felt emotion and, with the exception of “M. Butterfly,” more intellectual engagement than ever.

Directed by James Lapine, “Golden Child” has its world premiere at the Public on Nov. 17, a co-production with South Coast Repertory, which commissioned it. After closing in New York on Dec. 1, the show will transfer to the SCR Mainstage in Costa Mesa, opening Jan. 10.

“I wanted to write something detailed and less directly political than before,” Hwang says of the new play. “I sort of used Chekhov as my example. But I didn’t necessarily know I was going to write about my family history.”

“Golden Child” begins with a taxi ride from Manhattan that takes us back to China of a century ago, before arriving at Kennedy Airport. Unlike most of the writer’s plays, which generally have two main figures, this one has a handful.

It tells the story of the taxi passenger’s great-grandfather, Tieng-Bin, a widely traveled, well-to-do merchant with three wives. He returns to China from a trip to the Philippines with a British church missionary who converts him to Christianity. Although the encounter between East and West is rather comical at first, the consequences are tragic for the great-grandfather as well as his wives and a beloved daughter, who turns out to be the passenger’s maternal grandmother.

Sitting in a corner of the Time Cafe, a vast bistro on Lafayette Street down the block from the Public, Hwang has come from a rehearsal for “Golden Child,” where he left Lapine working on sound cues.

“One of the reasons for writing this play had to do with the fact that I’ve rejected Christianity,” Hwang said. “When you’re raised with a Christian fundamentalist mind-set, as I was, in order to free yourself from it you have to find something equally fundamentalist. I’m trying to take a more humanistic, complex view of how it is that my family came to the point it did in religion.

“To some extent--and this is really something I’ve developed more in rewrites--the story of Tieng-Bin is the story of somebody who’s been raised in a Confucian tradition, which is very rigid and fundamentalist itself. Freeing himself from that, he has to find a new big stick to beat down the old big stick. Fundamentalism begets fundamentalism. I’m trying to transcend the rigidity and reactiveness that I needed, too, at a certain point in my life to become my own person.”

Now 39, on the cusp of middle age, when writers are inclined to turn inward, it seems only natural for Hwang to explore his family’s roots in a serious way.

“In some sense I feel like this is a play I’ve been writing since I was 10, when I wrote a ‘novel’ from stories my grandmother told me,” he recounted. “It was fun to use the book as source material for something I’m doing now.”

But making art of raw materials requires considerably more than a firsthand witness. In this case, his grandmother’s stories only supplied the structure--that is to say, the plot of “Golden Child.” Although many events in the play mirror what he’d been told, Hwang said, he had to imagine the characters more thoroughly and invent new situations where there were gaps in his grandmother’s narrative.

Hwang’s mother, Dorothy, a pianist, was born in the Philippines after her family moved there from Amoy, a southern coastal town in China’s Fukien province across the straits from Taiwan. She came to the United States in 1952 to study piano at USC, where she met her future husband at a dance for foreign students. But when the pair decided to marry, her wealthy family--it owned the entire Philippine General Motors franchise, among many other ventures--insisted that her fiance convert to Christianity before they could wed.

Asked about the family’s reaction to the revealing details in his plays, Hwang says he “tends to apprise them” of what to expect “because my parents go out of their way to see everything I’ve done. But I don’t ask their permission to use what I want. They know my reaction: Sorry, I need that story.”

Hwang’s Shanghai-born father, Henry, came to the U.S. in 1948 and made his mark as a Los Angeles banker in 1974, when he founded the Far East National Bank. It was the first Asian American federally chartered national bank in the country, and the playwright has served on the board of directors. He expresses mild astonishment when it’s suggested that as a writer he might have been bored by the world of high finance.

“Not necessarily!” he replied. “The bank is family business.” Indeed, Far East National, whose shares are publicly traded on the American Stock Exchange, has given Hwang a kind of financial security many writers long for. His family holds the largest block of stock; his father is chief policy-maker; and the company recently announced its intent to merge with a Taiwanese bank, Sinopac, sending Far East National’s stock higher.

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Hwang has always strived to be self-reliant, however, and he hasn’t done too poorly. He gained international renown and became a millionaire several times over on the strength of “M. Butterfly.” As of last year, the play had grossed $35 million in U.S. earnings alone. In addition to the original Broadway production, which ran for nearly two years (777 performances), it had three national tours, was a hit in London’s West End and had major commercial outings in almost three dozen countries. However, the play has not had productions in China or France, which figure prominently in the plot.

Hwang was also unusually precocious. He came into his own with “M. Butterfly” at the age of 30, younger than Arthur Miller (33) with “Death of a Salesman,” Tennessee Williams (36) with “A Streetcar Named Desire” or Edward Albee (34) with “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Like them, Hwang wrote many plays before getting to the top, including “The Dance and the Railroad,” “The House of Sleeping Beauties” and “The Sound of a Voice,” to name just three. Yet he insists, as always, that he has learned more from his failures--”Rich Relations,” produced off-Broadway in 1986, for example, and most recently his disastrous 1994 Broadway flop “Face Value,” which lasted just eight preview performances and never opened--than he has from his successes.

“A playwright has to have a right to fail,” he said philosophically, “otherwise you’re not going to get the really good works.”

Hwang considers himself a “relatively quick” writer but noted, “I’ve gotten slower as the years have gone by. I hope it’s because I’m paying more attention.” He admitted, though, that writing became somewhat intimidating in the aftermath of “M. Butterfly.” Worldwide raves are a hard act to follow and he modestly said he doubts he’ll “ever reach that peak again.”

His first produced play, “FOB”(the title stands for “fresh off the boat”), took him just three weeks to complete, he recalled.

“It will always have a special place for me, because I wrote it before I knew how to do anything. As I get older, I find that craft is useful in the sense that it allows me to fix things more easily, to know where I’m going.

“But when it comes to that first draft, it’s almost as if you have to overcome your craft to be able to get back to the original impulse. Maybe that’s why it takes me a bit longer. I’m trying not to be facile. For the first draft, I don’t want to take advantage of the tricks I’ve learned along the way.”

Today, the once-divorced Hwang lives on the Upper West Side in a posh but sparely decorated apartment near Central Park with his second wife, Kathryn Layng, and their 8-month-old son, Noah.

Layng, an actress from Rockford, Ill., played the nurse for four seasons on the TV comedy-drama “Doogie Howser, M.D.” At the other end of the dramatic spectrum, she also played the brazen Renee in “M. Butterfly,” for nine months on Broadway; and she starred as the dominatrix in Hwang’s kinky 1992 one-act, “Bondage,” set in an S&M; parlor near Los Angeles (and produced for the Humana Festival by the Actors Theatre of Louisville in Kentucky).

Said Hwang: “I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m really happy. For me, the 1980s were about having a career; the 1990s are about having a life.”

For all his domestic bliss, however, it’s not as though he has chosen to ignore his career. If “Golden Child” is well-received both at the Public and SCR, “it’s fair to say that Broadway is a possibility,” director Lapine said in a separate interview.

“Naturally, a lot will depend on the critics, but I think the play will be pretty popular,” said Lapine, best known for his many prize-winning collaborations with Stephen Sondheim (“Sunday in the Park With George,” “Into the Woods,” “Passion”) and William Finn (“Falsettos”).

“I was asked last spring about directing this,” Lapine said, “which was flattering, because I’ve always admired David’s writing. But I ended up saying no because of another project. Then they called again in August, and I’m so glad they did. I don’t get offers to direct a play I haven’t written or isn’t a classic. This is the first one I’ve done.

“I love that ‘Golden Child’ is about a culture I didn’t know. And David’s a total doll to work with. Very, very flexible, intellectually stimulating. He’s an enthusiast in a way, even though he can be as withdrawn as I am.”

Late last month, Hwang traveled to Washington, where “Golden Child” received a $50,000 grant from the annual Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays--$10,000 to him and $40,000 to South Coast Rep for commissioning it and co-producing it.

Hwang says he owes a special debt to SCR--and particularly to its dramaturge Jerry Patch, who was one of his earliest advocates and who helped bring about the commission.

“Jerry is the first person who ever wrote me a letter of support from a real theater,” the playwright explained. “This was when I went to the [Eugene O’Neill] Playwrights Center in Connecticut to develop ‘FOB,’ before it got on at the Public. Jerry has no memory of the letter. But I treasured it. I still have it.”

Patch, for his part, discounts any special foresight on his part.

“I thought his first play was terrific, though we couldn’t do it. It knocked me out, and apparently I wrote the letter before we met. Then I met him at the O’Neill, and it was obvious by that point that he was the next thing going to happen. ‘FOB’ was out there.”

The late producer and Public founder Joseph Papp, for whom the theater is now named, was already interested in producing it and getting interested in Hwang’s next play, “The Dance and the Railroad.”

Patch returned to South Coast and told its co-artistic directors, David Emmes and Martin Benson, about “this kid who had a 250 IQ or something and was, I thought, the smartest young artist I’d ever met. The kid had a mind like a trap.

“So Hwang drives down from Los Angeles one day in 1982, and Martin and David give him this big commission,” Patch recalled. “It was a few thousand bucks, but that was a lot for us at the time.

“I don’t think Hwang really needed the money. He drove down in a Mercedes. But it meant something to him because he was very proud of the fact that he could make his own money.”

After writing several plays already committed to other theaters, Hwang spent the next five or so years on “M. Butterfly,” which was a commercial project from the outset. Then he wrote “Face Value,” which was unmistakably meant for a New York audience--it was a satire based on the well-publicized protests about the casting of “Miss Saigon” when it came to Broadway in 1991 with a white British star as the Eurasian lead (Jonathan Pryce, who had originated the role of the Engineer in London). It also portrayed the collective howl from Asian American performers who objected to “Miss Saigon” stereotyping their community as pimps and whores.

Because of its commission, South Coast had a first look at “Face Value,” which its officials did only pro forma they say, taking a pass for reasons of diplomacy (Hwang’s Broadway backers had dibs on the show) and dramatic art (the show would have been too big and expensive for their nonprofit theater).

But when Hwang’s agent showed “Golden Child” to Emmes and Benson, they took it. “The plan was to start in Costa Mesa and then go to the Public,” Patch said. “The change had to do with Lapine’s schedule. He had to stay in New York. Hwang really wanted him to direct, so we made the accommodation.”

Said Hwang: “They could have been hard-asses about it. But that’s not their style, and I’m grateful it’s not. I think they’re happy. I’m happy. And I’m getting the production I want.”

Certainly, he’s getting an A-team capable of taking “Golden Child” all the way. Lapine has brought on Tony-winning designers Tony Straiges (set) and Richard Nelson (lighting), among others, and the cast includes the celebrated Chinese, British-trained actress Tsai Chin, who won a 1995 Los Angeles Drama Critics Award for a featured role in Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior” at the Doolittle and who played Auntie Lindo in the movie of Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club.”

Between plays, moreover, Hwang has become a busy screenwriter. He’s currently midway through the second draft of a script for a Jessica Lange picture at 20th Century Fox, based on a Russian film called “Umbrellas for Newlyweds.” He has also written screen adaptations of “Possession,” the A.S. Byatt novel, for Sydney Pollack, which hasn’t been produced, and Dostoevski’s “The Idiot” for Martin Scorsese.

“That’s still a picture Marty intends to make,” Hwang said. “I love working with him. What’s so great is learning about film from him and getting paid for it.”

Meanwhile, Hwang is working on another Scorsese project, “Texas Guinan,” a vehicle for Bette Midler. And he’s done “The Alienist” for producer Scott Rudin, “which is somewhere at Paramount.”

Still, the playwright hasn’t had great luck in Hollywood. The two scripts that have reached the screen came and went: 1994’s “Golden Gate,” about an FBI agent (Matt Dillon) obsessed with the daughter (Joan Chen) of an accused Communist he’d hounded to death during the McCarthy era, and 1993’s “M. Butterfly,” which starred Jeremy Irons and John Lone, and was directed by David Cronenberg.

“The ‘Butterfly’ screenplay was rather impressionistic,” Hwang recalled. “My goal was to take some of the theatrical devices and find film equivalents. At the time David had just finished editing ‘Naked Lunch,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, he’ll love this stuff.’ But most of it didn’t end up in the movie. He made something quite naturalistic.

“Movies are a director’s medium, of course, and David’s a great artist. He worked really hard; he had his own vision of the piece. It was just slightly different from mine. Let’s leave it at that.”

A trained musician who played classical violin throughout his youth and later turned to jazz, Hwang also spends some of his time working on operas. He wrote the libretto for composer Philip Glass’ science-fiction music drama “1000 Airplanes on the Roof,” which premiered in Vienna in 1988 and toured the world. He also wrote the libretto for “The Voyage” (again with a score by Glass) on commission from the Metropolitan Opera, which premiered at the Met in a colossal 1992 production to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in America.

And he’s about to begin the libretto of a Bright Sheng chamber opera, “The Silver River,” on commission from the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, where it is scheduled to open next July.

Pondering the future--the national elections were on his mind--Hwang surveyed the Time Cafe with its homey decor put together from different American decades and picked at his half-eaten gourmet pizza.

“We don’t listen when it comes to race and culture in this country,” he said. “We go in with our minds made up, and then we try to batter the other side with our opinions. The situation becomes either confrontational or nonsensical. There’s no receptiveness, whether it’s a white male complaining about reverse racism or an American Indian complaining about the Atlanta Braves.

“We strive for order in our lives, for constancy, for something to believe in,” he continued. “But human experience is contradictory. In fact, our lives are a horrid tangle of ambivalences, self-delusions, accidents. In part that’s what ‘Golden Child’ is about. The attraction of any sort of fundamentalist ideology, whether it’s ethnic, political or religious, is this need to have some certainty, so you can say, ‘This is an unalterable truth. If I can hang my hat on this, my life will make more sense.’

“But finally all those fundamentalist efforts are doomed to fail, because life is never that simple. Face it, life is inherently complex.”

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* “Golden Child,” Joseph Papp Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St., New York. Now in previews, with world premiere scheduled Nov. 17. Closes Dec. 1. (212) 260-2400. Also scheduled Jan. 3 to Feb. 9 at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. (714) 957-4033.