| 'Where the next wave should go'
One of the reasons Yang chose Flower Drum Song to be in the twentieth-anniversary SFIAAF, he said, was that the themes were still relevant to Asian Americans today. "First- and second-generation conflict, assimilated versus not assimilated--these are obstacles we are still facing though our way of facing them is different," Yang says. Every minority group seems to have its own set of themes, says Hwang, agreeing that Asian Americans often dwell on the family or the clash of cultures. "Part of that is legitimate because many who do these plays are relatively close to the root culture, first- or second- or third-generation. They tend to have grown up with someone who comes from the root culture. So there is a natural tendency to be interested in sort of interface," he says. "On other hand, yeah, Asian American theater has to grow past these issues of assimilation," he stresses. A pause. "With Flower Drum Song, I feel I'm kind of returning to assimilation when I was dealing with other things than assimilation in M. Butterfly." What excites Hwang now is work by younger Asian American writers that doesn't deal with, but goes beyond, this trope. He points to Diana Son's Stop Kiss, as an example. "In the play, the lead character is an Asian woman, but that fact is never mentioned and yet there are things she does and issues that the play raises that are intrinsically Asian American. In the play, ethnicity of the character is one aspect of who they are, but it doesn't stand in for the entire definition of influences that go to create that character," he says. "There is also lots of work that involves characters of mixed race and blurs those traditional boundaries of how we categorize people in this country," Hwang says. "It's fascinating. I think that's where the next wave should go." But at the moment Hwang has so much on his plate that anything "new" for him will probably have to wait a few years. In addition to his work on Flower Drum Song, he has at least four other projects in the works. Coming soon to a theater near you is the film Possession, for which Hwang co-wrote the screenplay, and, coming a little less soon, is Magic Brush, a Miramax film Hwang has created with the largest animation and special effects studio in China. He is also working on a stage version of Tarzan for Disney as well as a play about the painter Paul Gauguin. Still, Hwang has some ideas for where he would like to go in the future. Although he has put up shows in places like Singapore, he hasn't brought his Asian American material to the largest Asian audience. "What I've never done and what I really want to do is to do a show in China proper," he says. He is optimistic that nothing will be lost in translation. Based on the success of his shows in Singapore, Hwang says he has come to realize "cross-cultural issues that [he] thought were Asian American issues are really pretty international. You don't have to be an American these days to wonder about Westernization." But whether or not the Chinese take to Hwang's brand of chop suey as they take to hula hoops and Sandra Dee is not going to stop Hwang from probing the questions of identity that undergird his work. "This question of identity is not really one that you're supposed to get a definitive answer to," he says. "I feel if I know the answer to that question, I can go ahead and die because there's nothing left to do here." React > Stepping to the beat of a different drummer 'We can put Chow Yun-Fat in that' 'Where the next wave should go' |