Public Radio East serves Eastern North Carolina by providing news, fine arts, and informational programming that challenges, stimulates, educates, and entertains an intellectually curious audience.

© 2026 Public Radio East

Public Radio East
800 College Court
New Bern, NC 28562

EIN 56-1802728
Public Radio For Eastern North Carolina 89.3 WTEB New Bern 88.5 WZNB New Bern 91.5 WBJD Atlantic Beach 90.3 WKNS Kinston 89.9 W210CF Greenville
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

David Henry Hwang: Honesty and Identity

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.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.