Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

76 Chapter 4 The Playwright
1960s Jewish Louisiana family much like Kushner’s own.
Caroline digs deeply but without polemic into America’s
complex race relations, finding, amid the misery, nuances
of grace, humor, and hope. On Broadway it received six
Tony nominations and afterward enjoyed a good run at
London’s National Theatre. His subsequent adaptation of
Bertolt Brecht’s classic of epic theatre, Mother Courage,
premiered at Shakespeare in the Park with Meryl Streep
in the title role and became the must-see event of the 2006
summer season in New York. And his Intelligent Homosexual’s
Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key
to the Scriptures opened in Minneapolis at the Guthrie
Theater in 2009 and had a successful run at New York’s
Public Theatre in 2011. Despite its exotic title and multiracial,
ambisexual cast of characters, it is a straightforward
dysfunctional family drama so realistic in its writing that
it often seems an homage to Anton Chekhov and George
Bernard Shaw—who are referenced in the text, which also
has covert allusions to the playwright’s American forebears:
Williams, Miller, O’Neil, and Albee. Kushner has
also enjoyed recognition for cinematic writing; his screenplay
for Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln was nominated for
a 2013 Academy Award. A giant among American playwrights
since Angels in America, Kushner seems dedicated
to build upon that stature for decades to come.
DAVID HENRY HWANG
Growing up in San Gabriel, California, David Henry
Hwang (born 1957) began writing—“on a lark,” he
says—while an undergraduate at Stanford University.
His first play, FOB (for “Fresh Off the Boat”), is a biting,
honest, angry reaction to hidden (and not-so-hidden)
American racism; it was first produced at Stanford and
subsequently at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in
Connecticut and at the New York Public Theatre, for
which it received the Obie Award.
Hwang’s subsequent M. Butterfly (1988), his most celebrated
work, explores the bizarre (and apparently true)
relationship between a French diplomat and his Chinese
mistress: bizarre because the mistress is revealed during
the play to be—unbeknownst, perhaps, to the diplomat—
a man in disguise. Hwang’s main subject is “Orientalism,”
the ingrained sense of deprecation with which Western
culture views the East. In Butterfly, Hwang, himself of
Chinese heritage, brilliantly interweaves gritty Western
romanticism (including portions of the Puccini opera
that gives the play its name) with Asian theatre and xiqu
(Chinese opera) technique, lending it political pertinence
and mythic proportions. Butterfly won Hwang the Tony
Award in 1988 and international fame. His subsequent
Golden Child (1998), a play about a traditional Chinese
family assimilating to Westernizing influences after
World War I, was also a Broadway critical success, earning
its author another Tony nomination for best play.
Hwang’s prominence continues in the twenty-first century.
His fascinating, semiautobiographical Yellow Face,
premiering at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in
2007, treats his own efforts, since M. Butterfly, to increase
the profile of Asian theatre artists in the American theatre
(and the many paradoxes inherent in seeking to define what
is truly “Asian” in America’s increasingly multiethnic culture).
And his Chinglish, which opened on Broadway in
2011, is a surprisingly comic examination of the difficulties
inherent in translation, both linguistic and cultural.
Hwang is even more widely known for his recent work as a
librettist—as the author of “books” (spoken texts) for
operas and musicals. Opera fans know his librettos for
Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland, Howard Shore’s The
Fly, and Philip Glass’s The Sound of a Voice, which have
premiered in Munich, Paris, and Cambridge (Massachusetts),
respectively, since 2007. Broadway-goers know his libretti
for the Disney productions of Aida and Tarzan, and his
own adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower
Drum Song, which played on Broadway after a Los
Angeles premiere. In 2014, Hwang’s play Kung Fu, a
kinetic biographical play about Bruce Lee that blended
martial arts with synchronized dance and Chinese opera,
premiered at the off-Broadway Signature Theatre. Like
Kushner, Hwang moves gracefully and effectively from
spoken to musical drama and is eager to create theatre
within a great variety of styles.
SUZAN-LORI PARKS
The plays of Suzan-Lori Parks do not merely create new
characters or situations within a recognizable world—
they invent new worlds altogether. Her work abides its
own internal logic, far from the recognizable structure and
language of traditional—or much untraditional—drama.
In the Blood, a reworking of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel
The Scarlet Letter within an urban wasteland, features
passages of wounded, broken, misspelled and abbreviated
language, such as this speech by the character of “Reverend
D,” who yearns for a certain kind of charity case:
Gimme big sad eyes with the berry-berri belly and the
outstretched hands struggling to say ‘Thank You’ the only
english they know, right into the camera. And put me up
there with them, holding them, comforting them, telling
them everythings gonna be alright, we gonna raise you
up, we gonna get you on the bandwagon of our ways, put
a smile in yr heart and a hamburger in yr belly, baby.