Golden Child Makes Bay Area Debut

I GUESS THERE ARE SACRED COWS, BUT I DON'T MIND TOUCHING THEM.

Photo by Carol Rosegg

Broadway Bound: David Henry Hwang's Golden Child opens this week at A.C. T. in San Francisco before moving on to New York. The cast includes Kim Miyori, Randall Duk Kim, Tsai Chin, and Ming-Na Wen.

BY PRINCE GOMOLVILAS

The last time David Henry Hwang took a play to Broadway, it flopped. Both a critical and commercial failure, Face Value--a farce about racial politics--opened and closed quickly in 1993. Whatever personal fears or regrets that may have erupted from that tumultuous experience will have to be set aside, however, because David Henry Hwang is going to Broadway again.

After successful productions at the Public Theater in New York, South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and Singapore Repertory Theatre, Golden Child will begin a four-week run on Feb. 18 at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.)--its last stop before opening April 2 at the Longacre Theater on Broadway.

Set in both contemporary Manhattan and early-20th century China, Golden Child was inspired by stories of Hwang's great-grandfather. In the play, the patriarch's conversion to Christianity greatly impacts the family, which includes three wives and a daughter The daughter, told she is the "Golden Child" touched by fortune, witnesses the power struggle between the wives when the father returns from his travels accompanied by a British Christian missionary. The family conflict serves as a microcosm of the cultural upheaval in 1920s China, when Western practices began to proliferate in the East.

Hwang says he started writing Golden Child when he was 10 years old. Of course, at the time he was unaware that he would become a wildly successful playwright with a shelf full of awards, including a Tony and two Obies.

At 10, he spent an entire summer with his dying maternal grandmother with the intention of recording her memories, because out of all his family members "she was the only one who held on to history." He then wrote a 90-page non-fiction document detailing the history of his family and distributed it to relatives who were pleased with young David's literary prowess.

Several years ago, Hwang pulled out the nearly 30-year-old document and used it as source material for Golden Child, "as a means for me to collaborate with my younger self" and as a way to deal with the decision concerning in which faith he would raise his then-unborn son.

The result of the younger David/older David collaboration is a mature exploration of religion, history, and assimilation. Hwang has dealt with religion before in other plays. It's an issue that has stuck with him perhaps because of his "born-again, fundamental Christian" upbringing. Family Devotions and Rich Relations, written in the early '80s, serve as bold indictments against religion. "I guess there are sacred cows," says Hwang, "but I don't mind touching them."

Over 10 years later, he sees Golden Child as "a much more forgiving look at the same issues" in those earlier plays. "Writing [Golden Child] helps me understand why these people made the decision that they did," Hwang says, referring to his great-grandfather's family. That decision, of course, had a direct impact on the way Hwang was raised--in a highly religious and restrictive Southern California household.

At its core, Hwang says Golden Child is about "the messiness of change." But the play's structure suggests much more than that. Framed in the present with a male character who's expecting his first child (much like Hwang himself a few years ago), the play also looks at how the past affects the present; how our history shapes who we are now. That character faces issues of faith and goes "back in history to deal with that," Hwang says.

Hwang's own history as a playwright was no doubt important to the creation of Golden Child, which he hopes people see as "a maturation of my work." His first play, FOB, was initially presented in the late '70s as a student production at Stanford University, where he received his theater degree. (A.C.T. artistic director Carey Perloff was a Stanford undergraduate at the same time as Hwang and saw that first production of FOB.) The play eventually made it to the Public Theater and won the 1981 Obie for best off-Broadway play, establishing Hwang as one of the country's leading Asian American writers, along with such cultural heavy-hitters as Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston.

After a string of productions, most of which originated at the Public, his career peaked in 1988 with his Broadway debut, M. Butterfly, which won a Tony and has since been produced in over 36 countries.

Many artists look upon Hwang's success with awe because he is one of the few Asian American playwrights who has managed to break away from ethnic-specific theaters and have his work produced to commercial success in mainstream venues--a distinction shared perhaps only by Philip Kan Gotanda and Chay Yew. However, prior to Golden Child, Hwang met failure with Face Value.

"Every failure," Hwang muses, "comes with certain blessings." The disaster of Face Value renewed his commitment to writing for the theater; an activity that he was not doing as much while writing screenplays and living in Los Angeles. Now a resident of New York, he has few specific long-term goals. Hwang says, "I just want to increase my play output." One could speculate that Golden Child, which garnered Hwang another Obie, could not have existed had Face Value not tanked; Hwang's themes of historical dependency spilling over into real life.

Incorporating significant changes in the text since its run at the Kennedy Center, the ACT production features an outstanding cast, which includes Randall Duk Kim, Tsai Chin, Kim Miyori, Ming-Na Wen, John Horton, and Julyana Soelistyo. Chin, who appeared in the films Red Corner and The Joy Luck Club, won an Obie for her performance in Golden Child at the Public. Kim, Miyori, and Horton are known for their Broadway performances (The King and I, Pacific Overtures, and Lettice and Lovage, respectively), while Wen was seen in the film One Night Stand, as well as The Joy Luck Club. Soelistyo has been with Golden Child since its premiere at the Public.

Frequent Sondheim-collaborator James Lapine, who was at the helm of the domestic productions of Golden Child, directs at A.C.T. as well. When he was searching for a director for this play, Hwang was drawn to Lapine mainly because of the film Impromptu, which Lapine directed. "[Lapine] created a world that seemed contemporary," Hwang says, but that was authentic to its time period (the early-19th century). Hwang wanted to achieve the same effect with Golden Child to illustrate how personal and social history impacts the present.

The future is another matter. "Whether or not [Golden Child] will succeed on Broadway, who knows?" Hwang says. "I don't know what's commercial, which forces me to fall back on writing about what I'm interested in." Judging by the play's pre-Broadway success thus far, audiences are interested, too.

Golden Child begins previews Feb. 13 and runs through March 15 at A.C.T. Call (415) 749-2228 for more information.

Prince Gomolvilas is a playwright whose Big Hunk o' Burnin' Love will premiere at the East West Players in Los Angeles this year. He also writes for Callboard magazine, a publication of Theatre Bay Area.

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