David Henry Hwang: Honesty and Identity

Published December 14, 2004 at 12:00 AM EST

David Henry Hwang is the author of several award-winning plays, from 1980's FOB (or "Fresh Off the Boat") to M. Butterfly.

For our series Scenes I Wish I'd Written, Hwang discusses an exchange from Tony Kushner's play Angels in America. The play -- subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes -- mesmerized audiences on Broadway in the early 1990s, and later on HBO.

The Los Angeles-born Hwang, who won a Tony for his 1988 M. Butterfly, says Tony Kushner's Angels in America stunned him. "It's funny, political, humanistic," Hwang tells NPR's Susan Stamberg. "I was knocked out by it."

Asked to choose a landmark scene from his own work, Hwang refers to his Golden Child. First performed in 1996, Hwang says the piece sprang from his own family's early experiences in the United States.

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