Golden Child
David Henry Huang
David Henry Hwang
Asian-American playwright David Henry Hwang
was inspired to write the award-winning play
Golden Child based on his interviews with his
grandmother living in Cebu. Tanghalang
Pilipino is staging this two-act play until
September 7 at the Cultural Center of the
Philippines.
• David Henry Hwang (1957-)
was born in Los Angeles and
grew up in San Gabriel, as
the first generation of a
Chinese American
fundamentalist Christian
family. His father, a banker,
immigrated to the US from
Shanghai in the late 1940s,
and his mother, a pianist
and music teacher, although
born in China was reared in
the Philippines.
David Henry Hwang
• One of three siblings, David Henry
Hwang, a star debater and violinist,
attended an elite preparatory academy
(the Harvard School) in North
Hollywood and, on graduation in 1975,
went to Stanford University where he
graduated Phi Beta Kappa in English.
• In 1979, Hwang submitted F.O.B. to the
National Playwright Conference at the
O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, CT,
where the play was staged with
professional actors.
In The Golden Child, set in
the early part of the 20th
century, Hwang would delve
deeper into his family
history to create a portrait
of a traditional Chinese
family on the cusp of jarring
change.
David Henry Hwang
• The following season, the Henry
Street Settlement in New York City
commissioned a new play by David
Henry Hwang for a forthcoming
ethnic heritage series; The Dance
and the Railroad transferred to the
Public Theater with actors John
Lone and Tzi Ma as two Chinese
laborers hired to build the
transcontinental railroad across
the United States in the midnineteenth century.
David Henry Hwang
• Having had four plays produced in three years, Hwang
took a break and traveled to Canada, Europe and Asia
to reassess his newly acquired status as an Asian
American voice in U.S. culture.
• Hwang returned to write Rich Relations, Bondage, Face
Value, and Trying to Find China Town, along with
television, screenplays, and the Tony award-winning M.
Butterfly, produced on Broadway in 1988, based on a
real-life espionage case involving a French diplomat
and a male Chinese agent masquerading as an actress
with the Beijing Opera.
David Henry Hwang
• More recently, David Henry Hwang joined as a
librettist with composer Philip Glass and stage
designer Jerome Sirlin to create a “science fiction
music drama” called 1000 Airplanes on the Roof,
followed by The Voyage, again with composer
Philip Glass, commissioned by the Metropolitan
Opera Company.
• Hwang turned again to his contemplations on
race, gender, and cultural identity in Golden
Child, produced on Broadway in 1998.
The works of David Henry Hwang
• Full-length playsFOB (1980) · Family Devotions (1981) · Rich Relations (1986) · M.
Butterfly (1988) · Face Value (1993) · Golden Child (1996) ·Peer Gynt (1998, with
Stephan Muller; from Ibsen) · Tibet Through the Red Box (2004, from Sis) · Yellow
Face (2007)
• Short playsThe Dance and the Railroad (1981) · The House of Sleeping
Beauties (1983, from Kawabata) · The Sound of a Voice (1983) ·As the Crow
Flies (1986) · Bondage (1992) · Trying to Find Chinatown (1996) · Bang
Kok (1996) · Merchandising (1999) ·Jade Flowerpots and Bound Feet (2001) · The
Great Helmsman (2007)
• Film/televisionBlind Alleys (1985, with Kimball) · M. Butterfly (1993) · Golden
Gate (1994) · The Lost Empire (2001) ·Possession (2002, with Jones and LaBute,
from Byatt)
• Music theatre1000 Airplanes on the Roof (1988, with Glass and Sirlin) · The
Voyage (1992, with Glass) · The Silver River (1997, with Sheng) ·Aida (2000, with
Woolverton & Falls, John and Rice, from Verdi) ·Flower Drum Song (2001, with
Rodgers and Hammerstein, from Fields, Hammerstein, and Lee) · Ainadamar (2003,
with Golijov) ·The Sound of a Voice (2004, with Glass) · Tarzan (2006, with Collins,
from Burroughs) ·Alice in Wonderland (2007, with Chin, from Carroll) · The
Fly (2008, with Shore)
Critical Introduction to Golden Child
• Playwright David Henry
Hwang describes his
work as a personal
journey that just
happens to have a
“public dimension”.
Golden Child combines
these dual facets of the
personal and the public
that characterize
Hwang’s writing.
Directed by Sandra Rockman
January 17 (preview) to
February 9, 2008 Nevada
Theatre, CA.
Critical Introduction to Golden Child
• Hwang’s play had its inception
in an unpublished novel, called
Only Three Generations and
based on tape-recorded
conversations with his maternal
grandmother about the family’s
history in China.
• On several occasions, Hwang
cites Anton Chekhov’s The
Three Sisters. Rather than the
sisters, Hwang’s play features
three wives (polygamy was the
norm of the time in China).
Golden Child went on to
Broadway and Julyana was
nominated for a Tony Award for
the role.
Critical Introduction to Golden Child
• Unlike Tennessee Williams’s The
Glass Menagerie where Tom
Wingfield, the narrator, plays a
younger version of himself in his
family story, the narrator of Golden
Child doubles as his greatgrandfather in scenes from 1918 to
1919.
• The inner play finds the actor
playing Andrew doubling as his
great-grandfather and the actress
playing his wife Elizabeth doubling
as Eling, a Chinese woman in her
early twenties.
Critical Introduction to Golden Child
• The inner play takes place in the
household of Eng Tieng-Bin in China with
his three wives (Eng Siu-Young, Eng Luan,
and Eng Eling) in various states of conflict
within a household managed by the three
women.
• It is not this playwright’s intention to treat
the encroachment of Western ideals on
China as an act that contaminates or
destroys a way of life. Instead, Hwang
insists that the exchange of ideas creates
opportunities for personal growth, for
new ways of thinking, and release from
such constraints as foot binding and
ancestor worship that keep people
anchored to the past, mired in the
present, and fearful of the future.
GOLDEN CHILD, by David
Henry Hwang. Produced by
Silk Road Theatre Project.
Opened March 2007 at Pierce
Hall Directed by Stuart Carden.
Critical Introduction to Golden Child
• Golden Child functions as an intercultural
text on several levels. In structure, it
combines realistic well-made playwriting
with the familiar dramatic frame of the
memory play, thus creating the outer
and the inner worlds of the play.
• As an intercultural text, Golden Child
blends cultural and theatrical traditions
of East and West in this story of familiar
change.
• In the intermingling of theatrical
traditions of Western writing and Eastern
lifestyle, David Henry Hwang speaks with
a universal voice on issues of freedom
and responsibility common to all
humankind.
Critical Introduction to Golden Child
• Golden Child, according to David
Henry Hwang, was a “problem
child”.
• Golden Child opened at the Public
Theater to mixed reviews but
producers stepped in and the play
went into development again with
an eye toward a Broadway
production.
• Golden Child reached the Longacre
Theatre on Broadway on April, 2,
1998, with director James Lapine
and designers Tony Straiges and
Martin Pakledinaz.
Synopsis
• Andrew Kwong is visited in a dream by his longdeceased Grandmother, Ahn, who insists on
telling him the story of her father once again to
give him one last chance to make a new life.
• Eng Tieng Bin’s family in China awaits his return
after spending several years of doing business in
the Philippines. His three wives worry about the
effect of his apparent interest in Western ways on
a household where ancestor worship is observed
and traditional rituals are practiced, setting off a
power struggle among them.
Synopsis
• After handing out gifts to his wives – Siu Yong, Luan and
Eling, Tieng Bin announces that he has invited Reverend
Baines, a British missionary, to visit. He later orders the
unbinding of Ahn’s feet, contrary to tradition. It becomes
clear that Tieng Bin has decided to turn his back on Chinese
customs and convert to Christianity, and his wives’ worries
become more pronounced: will he also choose just one
woman as his chosen wife?
• Tieng Bin’s decision results in unexpected consequences he
does not plan for nor remotely expects. It is his prized
offspring, Ahn, his Golden Child, who encourages him to go
back to the Philippines and promises to tell great stories
about how he made them all born again.
Performing Golden Child
• Prior to its Broadway opening on
April 2, 1998, Golden Child had a
number of developmental
readings and workshops at the
South Coast Repertory Theater in
Costa Mesa, CA, the Trinity
Repertory Company in residence
at Breadloaf in Vermont, the
Singapore Repertory Theatre, the
American Conservatory Theatre in
San Francisco, and The John F.
Kennedy Center in Washington,
D.C., before its premiere at The
Joseph Papp Public Theater/New
York Shakespeare Festival in New
York City.
• Golden Child
• By David Henry Hwang
Directed by Stuart
Carden. March 1 - May 6,
2007
Critics’ Notebook on Asian American
Drama
• For many years the standard English-language
sources on Asian theater practice were written by
Faubion Bowers (Japanese Theatre, 1952) and
James R. Brandon.
• With the emergence of Asian American
playwrights in the nonprofit and commercial
theater on the United States in the last quarter of
the twentieth century, anthologies of plays and
collections of interviews have been added to the
literature.
Critics’ Notebook on Asian American
Drama
• Creating his most personal and emotional
work to date, David Henry Hwang draws on
the true stories told to him by his
grandmother of his great-grandfather's break
with Confucian tradition by his conversion to
Christianity, and the eventual unbinding of his
daughter's feet. Golden Child explores the
impact of these decisions on each of his greatgrandfather's three wives, and succeeding
generations.
The core of us Golden Child By Jeff Hudson
• David Henry Hwang’s Golden Child, however, is
something else—a story about modern/Western ideas
moving into traditional Chinese culture. Largely set in
1918, the play features a progressive landowner (Hock
Tjoa) who traveled abroad and embraced Western
notions about individualism.
• To the horror of his three wives (who don’t entirely get
along), the landowner is exploring Christianity, which
initially plays as light comedy but becomes more
serious as the play progresses (practicing Christians
acknowledge only one wife per husband).
• To make matters worse, the landowner—despite the
fact that he finds women with “huge feet”
unattractive—orders First Wife (Yukiko Ohse) to stop
binding the feet of their precocious pre-teen daughter.
• Tjoa taps into the landowner’s compassion and desire What could be worse than
for knowledge, and also his inner conflict, as he tries to
reconcile traditional ancestor worship with new ways. having one wife?
The core of us Golden Child By Jeff Hudson
• First Wife, an arranged spouse, retreats into opium when a “white devil”
Anglican missionary (John Fisher) arrives. Second Wife (Lisa Moon)
schemes to advance herself. Third Wife (Cacie Mularchuk), the pretty girl
that the landowner picked for himself, comes from poverty and can’t grasp
the depth of the change underway.
• Through it all, the playwright asks, “What is it that makes you Chinese?”
and “How do you adapt your identity in a time of rapid, radical and
inevitable change—coming from outside?” We Americans face a similar
situation today. Hwang presents this play in a historic context, but the core
agenda hits us where we live.
• The CATS production features an elaborate, multilevel set, depicting
Chinese pavilions supported by stately red columns. The costumes recall
silk fashions from 100 years ago. Last Friday’s opening performance
featured a few more line glitches and little snafus than other recent CATS
productions, which tend to be pretty polished. But director Sandra
Rockman’s take on the script is savvy, and the show grows on you as the
story unfolds.
Dorinne Kondo, from About Face:
Performing Race in Fashion and Theater
• Given this particular sedimented history, Asian
Americans have a specific relation to the notion of
home. For mainland Asian Americans, surely one of the
most insistent features of our particular oppression is
our ineradicable foreignness.
• Given the continuing confusion of Asians with Asian
Americans, perhaps it is not surprising that one of the
most insistent themes in Asian American literature and
theater is a preoccupation with the claiming of
America as home…
Revisiting Interculturalism
• Intercultural texts demonstrate the collision of
cultures as writers from minority cultures
living in the West explore the contradictions,
ambivalences, and difficulties of the struggle
to retain ethnic, social, and ideological
separateness in worlds that discourage
exclusiveness.
Revisiting Interculturalism
• Conflict has been the basis of drama since its
beginnings in the early Greek festivals.
Intercultural dissonances are one recent
source of dramatic conflict in new American
playwriting since the eighties.
• Within the context of cultural diversity, efforts
to combine the riches of various cultures into
new artistic achievements are also celebrated
under the label transcultural.
Revisiting Interculturalism
• Transcultural artistic expression and
intercultural writing are ways contemporary
writers and artists mirror their multicultural
society and address global issues that affect all
humankind.
• Playwright David Henry Hwang discusses his
experiences with cultural assimilation and
family, topics he focuses on in his play,
"Golden Child". (play 42:05-the end)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=66
9783166282121566#
Review
• A Curtain Up Review Golden Child On Broadway
• David Henry Hwang’s Golden Child won an OBIE after its run at the Public
Theater seventeen months ago despite decidedly mixed
reviews. CurtainUp's review came in on the thumbs up side. Most of the
negative comments related to the awkwardness of the opening and closing
scenes set in contemporary New York.
• The play still focuses on the flashback to China, circa 1918 and the conflict
between tradition and change as depicted through one man's family
• The actors who made the strongest contribution to the play's pleasures,
have reprised their roles in this production -- Tsai Chin as the first and most
dramatically important of the three wives and Julyana Soelistyo in her dual
role as the play's title character and as the narrator Andrew's grandmother.
• Director James Lapine continues at the helm and the physical production is
beautiful as ever with the same set, lighting and costume designers in place.
Review
• Alas, all the rewriting -- making the narrator older, having grandmother appear in a
dream instead of as a vision in a taxicab -- has done little to dispel the quibbles that
sent Mr. Hwang back to his computer keyboard to begin with. The general
consensus seems even more mixed than for the original Off-Broadway production:
Matt Wolf of Variety wrote "The burden of ancestry may be one of many
provocative concerns in David Henry Hwang’s Golden Child, but such issues
ultimately pale next to a more immediate obligation — to be dramatic — that the
play just does not meet." About the re-configured modern day beginning he stated:
"If anything, the first act, in particular, suggests a dramatist softening his approach,
lest an audience be put off by what is, at heart, an Asian-American variant on the
African-American debates that have long fueled the work of August Wilson — a
grappling with ancestral ghosts among them.”
• Peter Marks of The New York Times also damned the rewrite with faint praise,
writing that "Hwang replaced some of the awkward plot devices, clarified his
central ideas and made the piece more active." He concluded, however, that the
play "is unable to buff its dull finish successfully.“
• Linda Winer of Newsday thought the beginning/end revisions an improvement but
still found them less captivating than the rest of the play which she generally liked
as much as we did
• Clive Barnes of The Post found the revision “more polished and truly rewarding”
but thought the beginning and end didn‘t work now any more than it did originally.
Review
• Criticism: In Hwang's 'Golden Child,' A
Cultural Collision Course
• David Henry Hwang narrates inspiration for
“Golden Child” by Jocelyn Dimaculangan
• David Henry Hwang -- About the Author
Youtube links
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David Henry Hwang talks about "M. Butterfly“
1988 - M. Butterfly
Asians in "Yellow Face" - David Henry Hwang
Reading of David Henry Hwang's YELLOW FACE
@ The Drama Shop in NY
• YELLOW FACE at Theatre Works
• Immigration Arts, Culture & Media NYC Event
• The DNA Trail Gala David Henry Hwang
• Interview with David Henry Hwang