Playwright Hwang Explores Heritage Conflicts : * In his wide-ranging talk at UCI, he covers his own background and the challenge of being an Asian-American writer.

IRVINE —  David Henry Hwang is a writer with more than a touch of irony. It shows up in his dramas, and it showed up Tuesday night at UC Irvine during a wide-ranging speech that veered from his own history to the challenge of being an Asian-American playwright to the question of racial casting.

On the last issue, Hwang, probably best known for his 1988 Tony Award-winning “M. Butterfly,” revealed a tiny grin when referring to the brouhaha that erupted 1990 over the Broadway casting for “Miss Saigon” a while back. First describing it as “a quiet little dispute,” he dropped the smile and became more serious.

“Actually, it was quite a mess,” Hwang sighed before an audience of about 150 at UCI’s Student Center Crystal Cove Auditorium. His talk, presented by UCI Lectures and Cultural Events, was part of Asian Heritage week activities on campus.

Of the many Asian-American performers, writers and stage technicians to complain about the casting of British actor Jonathan Pryce in a central role as an Eurasian pimp, Hwang was the first. His letter (written with B.D. Wong, who appeared in “M. Butterfly”) to Actors Equity asking the union to reject producer Cameron Mackintosh’s decision to cast Pryce in the Broadway version ignited the well-publicized protest.

Hwang conceded Tuesday that the conflict became rancorous and created an environment not conducive for “commonality,” a word he used frequently to underline the importance of people of diverse origins and opinions finding shared interests.

But he also said that the protest was valuable because it may lead to fairer treatment of minorities in the stage community (“This will be a struggle to determine how the limited resources (of the American theater) will be controlled”). In addition, the aggressiveness that Asian-Americans demonstrated helped to dismiss “the stereotype of Asian-Americans being submissive,” Hwang noted.

Speaking more about his own background, the California native said he began writing as “a therapy, a way of working out questions or conflicts. I project them onto characters and watch the clash of ideas.”

Many of those conflicts have come from trying to understand the balance between his status as an American and his Chinese heritage, Hwang said. “I knew I was Chinese, but it wasn’t that significant; it was more like a minor detail, like having red hair. . . . My writing became an exploration of what it meant to be an American and a Chinese-American.”

His first major play, “FOB” (the acronym for Fresh Off the Boat), was written while he was a senior at Stanford University and eventually won the Obie Award for Best New Play of 1981. It dealt with Asian-American assimilation, and his later dramas also reflected general themes about cultural contradictions.

In “M. Butterfly,” based on an improbable but true story about a French diplomat who had a 20-year affair with a male Chinese spy he thought was a woman, Hwang said he was, in part, trying to dispel the “fantasy stereotype of the Orient.” Gallimard, the diplomat, can persuade himself to believe that Song, his mistress, is a woman because he has an image of Asian woman as being mysterious and modest, which allows him to be deceived, Hwang said.

Hwang added that he identified with Song because the Anglo world often has treated him with condescension because of his “foreignness.” He explained that “I feel very American and yet I’m often perceived as a foreigner,” noting that the view has even affected the popularity of his plays.

“Sometimes I wonder if I’m providing Orientalia for the intelligentsia,” Hwang said. “(My plays) with dragons and gongs turned out to be the most successful.”

As for the future, Hwang described a busy schedule. He just finished a screenplay adaptation of Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot” for director Martin Scorsese and will be involved in the movie version of “M. Butterfly,” with shooting starting in the fall. Hwang also plans to begin directing his first feature film, “Red Angel,” about the same time.