David Henry Hwang

One of the most prolific and respected playwrights of his generation, David Henry Hwang was born in Los Angeles, California in 1957. He would earn a Bachelor's degree in English from Stanford and was halfway through Yale School of Drama's MFA program when his attention was drawn elsewhere-namely New York, where one of his plays was actually being produced. The work was "FOB," and its 1980 off-Broadway premiere met with major acclaim. He would follow this quickly with equally well received productions of his two plays "The Dance and the Railroad" and "Family Devotions" the following year, thus completing what Hwang would call his Trilogy of Chinese America. Hwang's Chinese heritage would remain a strong focus in much of his work however, quite noticeably in perhaps his hugest success, 1988's "M. Butterfly," which reworked Puccini's opera "Madama Butterfly" into a drama that dealt with perceptions of Asia's culture and psyche. The play would be Hwang's Broadway debut, and he later adapted it into a screenplay himself, which was directed by David Cronenberg in 1993. Hwang found continued success with plays like "Face Value" and "Golden Child," later wowing audiences and critics alike when in 2002, he reimagined the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "Flower Drum Song," long castigated for its outdated depictions of Asian peoples, and made the play more realistic and relevant to modern audiences. Though he would remain a mainstay in the theater world, particularly with the Broadway run of his play "Chinglish" in 2011, Hwang would branch more into film and TV during the 2010s, most notably co-producing and writing a number of episodes of the series "The Affair" (AMC, 2014-).