David Henry Hwang Wins $200,000 Prize for Playwriting

By PATRICK HEALY

The $200,000 Steinberg award for playwriting, the most generous prize in theater, has been given to Tony Award winner David Henry Hwang for 32 years of provocative satires and dramas (“Chinglish,” “M. Butterfly”) that brought more Asian and Asian-American characters to Broadway and other stages, the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust announced on Wednesday.

The 55-year-old Mr. Hwang, in a telephone interview, said the money has allowed him to decline film and television work recently and focus his time on writing plays. He called the award “essential” to remaining a full-time playwright, noting that he earned only $50,000 for three years of work on “Chinglish” â€" which ran last fall on Broadway â€" and $16,000 for four years of work on his play “Yellow Face,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2008.

“This award literally buys me time to focus mostly on my theater wor k,” Mr. Hwang said. “Even if you're lucky to have a play on Broadway like ‘Chinglish,' you don't necessarily earn enough off it to support the years it takes to get there.” (Playwrights earn royalties from future productions of their plays, but only hits are usually reliable moneymakers.)

Mr. Hwang said he is spending the summer finishing a first draft of a new work inspired by the life of Bruce Lee, “Kung Fu,” which will be staged Off Broadway in fall 2013 at Signature Theater Company. He is doing a bit of rewriting on his 1998 play “Golden Child” that Signature is producing this fall, while developing some musical projects too. And he has recently begun talks with the British theater producer Sonia Friedman about a revival of his Tony-winning “M. Butterfly” in London and on Broadway in the next few years.

Mr. Hwang is also writing a screenplay adaptation of “Chinglish,” his Broadway comedy last fall about cu ltural misunderstandings between Chinese and English-speaking entrepreneurs. The production drew respectful but tepid reviews and closed after three-and-a-half months, disappointing Mr. Hwang and others who saw the play as a crossover opportunity for an Asian tale to appeal to the predominantly white consumers of Broadway as well as Asian-American audiences and others. The movie director Justin Lin (“The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift”) is attached to the “Chinglish” project, Mr. Hwang said.

The Steinberg award was created in 2008 to honor established, mid-career, and emerging playwrights. The $200,000 award, recognizing writers with extensive bodies of work, is given every other year; it went to Tony Kushner (“Angels in America”) in 2008 and Lynn Nottage (“Ruined”) in 2010. Other Steinberg awards, with smaller cash prizes, have recently gone to newer playwrights like Lisa D'Amour (“Detroit”) and Melissa James Gibson (“This”).