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By Joey B. Ting, Contributor
The playwright of the moment, David Henry Hwang,
is known in the world theater scene as the first Asian American to
have won a Tony Award for Best Play with M. Butterfly in 1988. For
his dedication and artistry, former US President Bill Clinton
appointed him to be in the President’s Committee on the Arts and
Humanities.
His talent for writing led him to numerous
outstanding written works including the Chinese American
trilogy—FOB, Family Devotion and The Dance and the Railroad, Face
Value, 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof and The Voyage with Philip Glass,
The Silver River for Bright Sheng and Golden Child.
Golden Child garnered Hwang a Tony award
nomination for Best Play in 1998 and earned him an Obie award for
Best Play for the same year.
A decade after its citation, Tanghalang
Pilipino, resident theater company of the Cultural Center of the
Philippines under the new artistic directorship of Nanding Josef,
proudly brings once again the play to life on stage with theater
thespians Art Acuna, Irma Adlawan Marasigan, Liesl Batucan, Tina
Chilip, Tess Jamias and Leo Rialp under the direction of
Obie-awardee Loy Arcenas.
Hwang reveals what the play is all about: “The
play deals primarily with Christianity and how good and bad things
represent change, especially in the Philippines where corporate
western values are much practiced by the people.”
Hwang also shares his ups and downs with Arcenas,
the director. “I know Loy because we were with several theater
productions. He was the set designer for the New York staging of the
Golden Child and in Face Value where he also took charge of the set
design but the production was totally a huge fault. Loy has nothing
to do with it,” he attests, adding, “And there’s Magno Rubio
which he won for an Obie Award. Loy is best known for his degree of
emotional power that combines it with his expertise on the visual
aspect and of course, his visceral power.”
As a playwright, he admits using his own family
experiences as his springboard for his subjects in writing a play.
In Golden Child, he explores the complexities of his grand
mother’s experiences in strict traditional Chinese culture
blending it with the coming of western Christianity. “I
fictionalized some of the scenes in the play and followed through
some experiences of my ancestors,” he smilingly noted.
He reveals his creative process: “Before I
write a play, I would choose a theme and think of the problems and
issues that revolve around it. Then I would think of how to start
and end the play before writing the whole thing. I steal, borrow
forms from other playwrights and come up with something
effective.”
Hwang gives his message to everyone who intends
to write a play and those interested to take theater as a course.
“Read as many plays as possible, the more you know; the more you
could do.”
For his part, Hwang asked what the state of
theater artists is today. How do artists survive despite of the
economic crises that they are facing today?
Artists here in the Philippines are multi-taskers.
Many would work at their day-job (example: teaching) while they
rehearse for plays at night. Other artists would take television,
advertising, events and cinema as their bread and butter and
occasionally would join in a theater production. David Henry Hwang
noted that these conditions were the same endured by practitioners
living abroad.
Golden Child currently performs at the CCP
Little Theater until August 31 with 8p.m. performances on Fridays
and Saturdays and 3 p.m. matinees on Saturdays and Sundays. The show
will be presented in English from August 8 to August 17, and in
Filipino from August 22 to August 31. Tickets are P600 with
discounts for students, senior citizens and block sales.
For tickets and sponsorships, call 832-3661, 832-3704 and
891-9999.
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