ARTicles vol. 1 i.4: words from a zen garden

Ryan McKittrick: Both The Sound of a Voiceand Hotel of Dreamswere influenced by Japanese stories and art. What in particular inspired you?

David Henry Hwang: I’m interested in the art that came out of Japan in the seventies and early eighties, when Japan was rising as an economic power. I was particularly influenced by films such as Nagisa Oshima’s Empire of Passionand In the Realm of the Sensesand Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicideand Demon Pond. The Sound of a Voicewas also inspired by Kwaidan, a book of Japanese stories written by Lafcadio Hearn and adapted into a film by Masaki Kobayashi. These films were made during a period of great cultural fusion in Asia. Japanese aesthetics had been influenced by Western values and pop culture, and the artists were trying to fuse foreign values with traditional notions of space, stillness, and the power of what is unseen or unsaid. In much of my work I have tried to create an East-West cultural fusion, and I am interested in the artists who do that from the Asian side. I am not Japanese or even Japanese-American. I am Chinese-American, so I drew from my perceptions of the Japanese aesthetic and tradition, not scholarly or firsthand cultural experiences.

RM: What do you mean by a Japanese sense of space, and how does that manifest itself in The Sound of a Voiceand Hotel of Dreams?

DHH: I’m referring to a spareness. If you look at a Zen garden or a rock garden, there’s a simplicity, an elegance that comes from placing just a few objects in a very particular way. The Sound of a Voicedemonstrates this spareness and stillness. The piece has very short lines–there’s a lot left unspoken, a lot left to be played in the pauses. Through most of the piece, the man and woman’s interactions are colored and determined by secrets they keep from each other and the audience. Whenever I work on a libretto I try to write in a very spare style, because libretti don’t need as many words as plays. Hotel of Dreamsis somewhat wordier but a lot of the emotion is understated. On its surfaceHotelis composed of rational conversations between two older people–conversations that do not have the kind of passion we associate with great love. But beneath the surface, there are very powerful emotions.

RM: In The Sound of a Voicea man comes to a remote corner of a forest and finds a beautiful woman who is rumored to be a witch. The woman in the woods is a recurring figure in Japanese ghost stories. How is your character different?

DHH: She’s certainly influenced by Japanese stories about women who turn into foxes or evil spirits. But what makes this woman different from the Japanese trope is that she confronts and is conscious of the perceptions people have of her. She’s also aware of how those perceptions oppress her. Whether or not she actually is a witch becomes irrelevant. She is treated as if she has powers, so for all intents and purposes she is a witch. I suppose I created a metaphor for the way men and women relate to one another in general. We go into relationships with certain preconceptions, and often those preconceptions become somewhat self-fulfilled. So I suppose I’ve put a modern psychological and social spin on the traditional Japanese trope.

RM: What do the two pieces say about love?

DHH: Neither piece seems optimistic about love. In Hotel of Dreamsthe characters can only really fall in love when they know they don’t have to continue living. In The Sound of a Voice, the man’s paranoia about dependency prevents him from having an intimate relationship. The moment the man becomes dependent on the woman in the forest, he feels emasculated. Ultimately, he is not able to be intimate, because any sort of intimacy demands a vulnerability to becoming dependent. The characters in both pieces need love, but love is impossible. The only alternative is death. If they’re unable to love, they must die.

RM: Faces are a recurring image in your writing. In Hotel of Dreamsthe woman transforms herself by powdering her face, and in The Sound of a Voicethe woman’s face changes physically.

DHH: One of the most important themes in all my work is the fluidity of identity. You can think you’re one person, but in a different social context you can be transformed into somebody you may not recognize, somebody completely different. The face expresses who you happen to be at a particular moment. It also expresses the way that people perceive you and how those external perceptions affect your own notion of self. One of the crucial moments in M. Butterflyis when Song removes his female face and reveals himself to Gallimard. My play Face Valueis a farce about mistaken race identity. It bombed in Boston, but someday I’ll get back to it.

RM: Do you hear the influences of any playwrights in The Sound of a Voiceor Hotel of Dreams?

DHH: I hear Pinter in The Sound of a Voice, because the piece is about silences and what the audience doesn’t know. There’s also a sense of menace in it. Hotel of Dreamsis a bit wordier than most of my other works. An earlier version of the piece even felt a bit like one of those English tour-de-force boulevard plays that Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright used to do. I actually had a fun experience with Olivier and that earlier script. About a year before he died, I got to go to his house in Chelsea. He sat in a chair and read both parts for me. We never mounted a production, but he was really excited about the piece.

RM: What role does music play in The Sound of a Voiceand Hotel of Dreams?

DHH: I think The Sound of a Voiceis one of my most overtly poetic works. It has a lot of scenes without any dialogue, and the piece demands that thoughts and character be conveyed through means other than words. The words convey part of the meaning, but the dialogue doesn’t tell you everything. The music fills in the gaps. Hotel of Dreamsis a bit wordier, but I think its subject-matter calls for music. The piece is largely about a dreamlike state. Almost all the crucial moments take place within the mind of the old man, and the music helps create an erotic, emotional dreamscape.

RM: You collaborated with Philip Glass on 1000 Airplanes on the Roofand The Voyage. What do you appreciate about his music and why does it suit your writing?

DHH: Philip’s music transcends the particulars of any given existence and takes you to another plane of consciousness. It provides an omniscient view of the world, where all things exist in the same realm. His score for The Hours, for example, knit together three different time periods and made them all part of the same world. It made you feel that everything could exist at the same time. I think the film could have been much more disjointed without Philip’s music. In my own work I’m interested in transformation and juxtaposing different worlds, periods of history, and even galaxies. Philip’s work allows those transformations and juxtapositions to happen seamlessly.

Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T.’s Associate Dramaturg