From tuxedos to 'Tarzan'

As a Chinese-American, David Henry Hwang is used to being tugged at by dueling identities.

But the playwright is bifurcated in another way, too. He knows life in the pop lane, having written screenplays and the book to Broadway shows like "M. Butterfly" (a Tony Award winner) and Disney's "Aida." He is penning the story for Disney's theatrical version of "Tarzan," with songs by pop singer Phil Collins. But Hwang also has written award-winning straight plays and opera libretto.

"It's hard to think of another artist who's worked with Elton John and Philip Glass," says Mr. Hwang, chuckling, as he speaks by phone from his home in New York.

"I sort of get a kick out of it," he says of moving between high and pop culture.

His ease may have come from having immigrants as parents, he says. "I grew up just sort of freshly absorbing whatever Western, American cultural influences came into my sphere without any preconceptions from my parents about how I was supposed to process them."

He currently is collaborating with Mr. Glass on "The Sound of a Voice," an opera receiving its world première this month at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. The words are based on two one-act plays Hwang wrote 20 years ago. To turn them into opera libretti, he pared them down to match the minimalist texture of Glass's music.

In the first act, based on Japanese folk tales, a wandering Japanese warrior meets a woman living alone in the woods. Is she a witch trying to ensnare him or a lonely recluse longing for friendship? Is he there to rest or to kill her? In the second act, the madam of a modern-day Japanese brothel befriends an elderly customer. Again, the identities of the man and woman are unclear. He is a journalist who may be writing a story that will put her out of business. She is drugging her girls and clients, but why?

The plays are "about loneliness and solitude and the inability of men and women to connect," he says. Hwang set them in Japan, because when he wrote them in the early 1980s, his native China was still largely closed off to the West.

"Both these pieces are influenced by a lot of reading of Japanese literature I was doing in those days," he says.

"Sound of a Voice" marks his third project with Glass. "We get along really well. We have a nice track record in producing pieces that we're both proud of. A lot of my work is about the coming together of different worlds. And I feel that Philip's music takes one to a transcendent place where the differences between seemingly unlike worlds start to feel not so significant."

Page: 1 | 2