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The Man Who Can Make Bruce Lee Talk

David Henry Hwang, whose new play, “Kung Fu,” is inspired by Bruce Lee.Credit...Jeff Brown for The New York Times

On a late summer morning, in a room far west on 42nd Street, Bruce Lee, who has yet to become the greatest martial artist of all time, is putting the moves on a young Japanese-American dancer.

“Cannot fight the qi force,” Bruce informs her. “Energy. Between man and woman. Very powerful. So must allow the flow, the qi force to —”

She interrupts him. “You’re using ancient Chinese philosophy? To get into my pants?”

“Philosophy,” he says, “it should be practical.”

The line got its laugh from the small group in attendance, including David Henry Hwang, who wrote it. As he listened to the first 70 pages of his new play, “Kung Fu,” his face softened. The brashness of the Bruce Lee he is creating tickled him. The only thing that betrayed his anxiety was his right hand, clamped so firmly over his mouth that it seemed to become his center of gravity. He learned long ago not to reveal his feelings.

A quarter-century after “M. Butterfly” won him the Tony Award, Hwang, a first-generation Chinese-American, still bends under the lifelong weight of expectations from his high-achieving immigrant family. He will come to sparkling life on a panel or at a lectern; he will give a pithy quote about multiculturalism to the media. But the real Hwang, the one with the wicked sense of humor, the soaring emotionalism of an opera diva and the pounding anger of a neglected child, is glimpsed almost exclusively onstage. So today, it is Bruce Lee who gets all the best lines, the ones Hwang would never even consider saving for himself.

When the reading was over, James Houghton, the founding artistic director of the Signature Theater, where it took place, embraced Hwang and said, “It’s great, man.”

Hwang answered excitedly: “I know where it’s going, I’m finding his voice.” When he realized I’d heard him, he balked. “I have to get a mint, excuse me,” he said, walking away. This was classic Hwang. Don’t count your chickens and never brag.

This year, though, Hwang has earned his bragging rights. The Signature will devote a season to his 32-year career, reviving two plays, and will support the world premiere of “Kung Fu.” Yes, you can win a fellowship from the Guggenheim or Rockefeller Foundations (Hwang has won both) to prove your playwriting prowess, but in the American theater, nothing tops a Signature season. Among Hwang’s predecessors are Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard and August Wilson.

On Tuesday, Hwang’s season opens with “Golden Child,” a juicy family history inspired by his great-grandfather’s three wives. The play ran on Broadway in 1998 but began as an oral history that Hwang took as a 10-year-old from his grandmother, the golden child of the title and among the first generation of girls never to have her feet bound. When she became ill in 1968 and seemed near death, Hwang traveled to the Philippines (alone), where he wrote her story, which became the basis for the play. She did not die. She saw the play, at 90, in California.

Next up is the first major New York revival of “The Dance and the Railroad,” a poignant pas de deux between two young Chinese immigrants in the 1860s, torn between their impulses to assimilate and to preserve their cultural heritage. Joseph Papp produced it at the Public Theater in 1981. “Kung Fu,” which Hwang envisions as a play with music and movement, requiring a more elaborate production, will open in the 2013-14 season.

Hwang, 55, has had the career of a golden child himself. He began working as a playwright while a senior in college, when he wrote “F.O.B.” (fresh off the boat) for a production in his dormitory at Stanford. The following year, the play opened at the Public Theater, winning an Obie Award. At 24, he dropped out of the Yale School of Drama because, well, he was already in business. Six years later, “M. Butterfly,” based on the true story of a French diplomat’s 20-year affair with a Chinese opera star who was actually a male spy, made him the most famous Asian-American playwright in the history of the American theater.

Along the way, he was anointed as spokesman, standard-bearer and, unavoidably, lightning rod of sorts among Chinese-Americans, freighted with their expectations, jealousy, anger and pride, sometimes all at once. The secret to his career success, besides good manners and a thick skin, is that his talent, bold and undeniable, has always been paired with a killer work ethic. He has had seven shows produced on Broadway; along with his own plays, he co-wrote the book for Disney’s musical version of “Aida” (score by Elton John), and he wrote the book for Disney’s “Tarzan” (score by Phil Collins).

Hwang’s writing veers tonally from sharp and funny to dramatic and sweeping to poetic and lyrical, but it is the emotional intricacy of his characters’ struggles — most often strangers in a strange land, unfamiliar with the language or, even more dangerously, with the language of love — that resonates after the curtain falls.

Hwang’s most recent play, “Chinglish,” about an American hoping to do business in China, was inspired by his own visits there in 2005, when he saw translated signs like “Deformed Man’s Toilet” in place of “Handicapped Restroom.” These mistakes became the backdrop for his musings on communication — whether in business or in romance, you can’t always assume the other person knows what you’re trying to say. Leigh Silverman, who directed the 2011 Broadway production of “Chinglish,” encountered Hwang’s idiosyncratic mode of communication during their first meeting, when he considered her to direct his previous play, “Yellow Face.” It is a darkly farcical work, a complex mix of fact and fiction starring a character named D.H.H. “He thought I didn’t understand the play,” Silverman recalled, “and he thought I didn’t like the play. But he hired me anyway, since he knew at the very least I would be honest. David is rigorous with himself, always looking for the better idea.” His instinct was right. “Yellow Face” ran at the Public Theater and became a Pulitzer finalist. Silverman will also direct “Golden Child” and “Kung Fu.”

“David writes plays that are unique to him as both insider and outsider in this country and in China,” she said. “He lives in an uncomfortable juxtaposition of success and a deep state of anxiety. He’s an incredibly tender person, sensitive, but also tender to the world, which makes him a great writer and a great empath.”

Finding the softer side of a tough guy like Bruce Lee, who died in 1973 at 32, is a perfect Hwang assignment. “If you look at all the images I grew up with,” Hwang said when we spoke at Signature after the reading, “Asian men were villains or comic figures or subservient like Hop Sing, the Cartwright family’s cook on ‘Bonanza.’ Bruce Lee created this new paradigm that an Asian man can be strong, respected. He wanted to be a hero, this Asian kid from Hong Kong who had an accent, whose English was poor, who wore glasses, the opposite of what we imagine a hero to be. How he gets there is a humanizing story, someone who could easily have failed, who did fail at certain things.”

In “Kung Fu,” Bruce Lee says, “The true fighting is from inside, not with body but with emotions.” Hwang has spent his own life fighting emotions, most notably those surrounding his relationship with his hard-driving father. But people were lining up now, waiting to congratulate him. That story would wait. It is part of what defines him.

Hwang lives on a block of brownstones in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn with his wife, the actress Kathryn Layng, and their two children, Noah, 16, and Eva, 11. They have been in this house for three years, during which time Hwang has been writing on a television stand surrounded by boxes on the garden level. He recently had the space renovated, but the boxes were still packed.

“I never made an office for myself before,” he said, entering the spacious room with pale yellow walls and refinished wood floors. His desk and chair were already in use; a pad was propped beside his computer. “I mostly write longhand,” he said. “I have really bad handwriting, so it feels secret, like no one can figure out what I’m writing. Typing it becomes the second draft. If I can’t figure out what I’ve written, it’s probably not that great.”

As Hwang started unpacking cartons of books, in shorts, a T-shirt and a pair of banged-up Ugg slippers, I could feel how skittish he was. He became famous at such a young age that his public persona — polite, respectful, brilliant yet low-key as he riffs eloquently on the issues of the day — developed far more quickly than his private persona — polite, respectful and squirmy at the prospect of self-revelation. Often when he speaks, he seems to be simultaneously translating his words in his head, calculating how they might be corrupted in print. He grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, near Pasadena, with a Chinese father, Henry, who hungered for fame and fortune, and an evangelical Christian Chinese mother, Dorothy, who played the piano and kept her emotions close.

Henry Yuan Hwang emigrated from Shanghai and met David’s mother, a Fujianese Chinese émigré from the Philippines, at the University of Southern California in 1953. After running a laundry and working as an accountant, Henry found success later in life, founding Far East National Bank, the first federally chartered Asian-American bank in the continental United States. (He sold it to Bank SinoPac of Taiwan in 1996 for $90 million.)

But Henry didn’t always stick to the straight and narrow. In 1976 he claimed to have been kidnapped, made to drink a liquid that disoriented him and ransomed for $300,000. The case was never solved. He also was implicated in a scandal in Los Angeles, after hiring Tom Bradley, then mayor, as a consultant. It turned out that Bradley once received a loan from Far East National and was said to have helped the bank secure $2 million in deposits of city funds.

With a father like this, Hwang seems to have spent much of his life in an attenuated seventh grade, silently wailing “Daaaaad!” while writing like a dervish in a form where he controls every character’s voice. His father has popped up in a number of his plays, and the potshots Hwang took at him were hilarious, if savage. Henry loved them all, thrilled to be noticed.

During the Reagan years, Henry became a leading supporter of the Republican Party, though he later backed Bill Clinton during his presidential campaign. That change of allegiance proved troublesome when The Times reported in 1999 that Far East National was being investigated for possible money laundering on behalf of Chinese officials. “The article was not clear on the specific charges,” Hwang said, taking a break from his unpacking. “It attempts to make some sort of circumstantial link between the fact that my father supported Clinton and the charge by some Republicans that the Clinton administration was slow to investigate the money-laundering charges.

“There is this confluence of things that happened in the late 1990s, before 9/11,” Hwang continued, “that seemed to prepare for the notion that China was going to be the next big enemy of the United States. Wen Ho Lee. Donorgate. I feel like my father got pulled into that period of people being nervous about China’s influence on the U.S. It was typified in a National Review cover which had Clinton and Hillary and Al Gore dressed in stereotypical Chinese costumes with slanty eyes.”

Was his father upset by the accusations? Hwang shook his head. “He was excited about the possibility that he might testify at the Senate Banking Committee and become a big star like Ollie North,” he said. “He was so certain he didn’t do anything wrong, he knew he would be exonerated.”

No charges were ever brought against Henry — much to his chagrin. He fed his voracious need for publicity by feasting on his son’s renown. “Between the ages of 22 and 26, I had four well-received productions at the Public Theater,” Hwang said. “My dad was proud of me, but he was also proud of the way I reflected on him. By 1986, when Second Stage produced my play ‘Rich Relations,’ I decided to drop my middle name.” Although Hwang’s voice remained even, his face was drawn; it was wrenching for him to speak of something so personal. His father died of colon cancer in 2005, but for Hwang, he seemed very much present. “My dropping his name was a heartbreaking thing for my dad because he would say, ‘My name is in your name,’ and if I dropped it, he would feel like he wasn’t part of my success anymore. But I wanted my success to be mine.”

Hwang’s conflict with his father also explains his defensiveness on the topic of money. His money. When I mentioned press reports of “M. Butterfly” grossing more than $35 million, 20 years ago; the sale of his father’s bank; even the recent announcement that the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust gave him a playwriting award of $200,000, he physically recoiled. Part of his golden-child persona, to judge from some online commentary, is that he is a rich kid who always had it easy. That “M. Butterfly” was such a monster commercial hit so early in his career fuels this perception. Anger turned Hwang’s voice thin and high.

“I got a very small percentage of that ‘M. Butterfly’ money,” he said, “and as a one-time thing in a career as a playwright, I was very lucky to get it. As for my dad, he didn’t start making money until I was in college. Then yes, he had a nice cash-out along with the bank’s 300 investors, and he left that money to my mom. I have to support myself and my family from my work, like anyone else. It was important to me to find a field in which I could make my own mark because my father was self-made. Perhaps one of the reasons I went into something completely different was that I had to do it on my own.”

His name change lasted for only one play. “In ‘Rich Relations,’ which was a big flop, by the way, the plot is sort of autobiographical, except I made all the characters white,” Hwang said. “The son teaches at a private school, and he is sleeping with some of his students, and the father will not see that. The father is determined to praise the son but never see the son. I think I was mad at my dad when I wrote that play because I felt like we didn’t have a relationship. He didn’t really see me when I was a kid. Once I became successful, he saw my success. But I still don’t know that he saw me.”

Which is why he feels so fortunate in his marriage. Layng, a bubbly blonde, as chatty as her husband is reserved, played Nurse Curly Spaulding on “Doogie Howser, MD.” The two met when she appeared in “M. Butterfly” on Broadway. (Hwang’s first marriage, to Ophelia Chong, a graphic artist, ended in divorce after three years.) “Kathryn is someone who’s very in touch with her emotional life,” he said. “One of the things she said early in our relationship was, ‘Nothing you feel can be wrong,’ which was a paradigm shift for me. Her ability to be in touch with her emotions is a huge part of the fabric between us. She is unfailingly honest, which I admire and aspire to, but I’m not unfailingly honest. The vulnerability that comes from talking about emotions and feelings exposes me in a way that makes me feel I’m not safe. Therefore it becomes a powerful outlet to get in touch with those things through my work.”

He unpacked some more books before coming upon a cache of family photographs he said he hadn’t seen in years. He dropped to the floor, sitting cross-legged as he sorted through a large pile, amused, identifying assorted relatives. There was his father, his face eagerly expressive, so unlike his own. Kathryn, beaming, at the Great Wall, so early in their relationship. The longer he looked the less he spoke, as the images pulled him back through time, his face a kaleidoscope of feelings: joy and wistfulness, communion and great love. Without saying a word.

Alex Witchel is a staff writer for the magazine and the author of “All Gone: A Memoir of My Mother’s Dementia. With Refreshments.”

Editor: Sheila Glaser

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 36 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Man Who Can Make Bruce Lee Talk. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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