Residency One playwright David Henry Hwang and director Leigh Silverman continue their longstanding
collaboration with Kung Fu, David’s world premiere play. Kung Fu leads us through Bruce Lee’s early years in
Seattle, examines his relationship with his family, and explores his struggle to become a respected martial
artist in Hollywood. The play employs original and traditional music, martial arts, Chinese opera, and modern
dance to create a bold new form that David and Leigh half-jokingly call a “dance-ical”. In between a recent
staged reading and the start of rehearsals the artists sat down with Literary Associate Sarah Rose Leonard to
discuss portrayals of Asian masculinity, how Bruce Lee inspires them, and what it’s like to play with a new form.
Signature: How did you start writing about Bruce Lee?
towards the end of his life, when he’d been in the states for a
David Henry Hwang: I’ve wanted to do a show about Bruce
decade or more, he’s still got an accent. So giving myself that
Lee since the mid ‘90s. At that point I got in touch with Linda,
permission actually helped to unlock the character in a very
Bruce’s widow, who was very supportive, and throughout a
substantive way. I could hear his voice in a way that I never
lot of the 2000s I tried to do it as a musical. That all kind
could when I was trying to do previous drafts.
of fell apart. And then a few years ago, when we were
planning this season at Signature, I started thinking that
I still wanted to work on a Bruce Lee story because I feel
like the image of China has changed so much. When I
Signature: You both worked together on Yellow Face,
Chinglish, and Signature’s recent production of Golden
Child. What has your collaborative process been like so far?
was a kid, people would go, “Eat your food– think
DHH: I feel like we have a pretty easy shorthand at this point.
about the starving kids in China.” Now China is the
Leigh makes me write it, first of all.
next superpower. That’s been a huge change within
Leigh Silverman: Bossy. Very bossy.
my lifetime, and Bruce Lee comes along just at the
DHH: Working on the tour of Chinglish, every time we got
moment when things start to shift. I thought back
on the musical and the idea that maybe what the
problem was was that every time we tried to make
Bruce Lee sing, it felt very kind of “South Park-y,”
but not in a good way. And so the idea formed of
doing a play that would have numbers, in that it
would have martial arts and have dance, but no
one would actually have to sing. That seemed
exciting to me, and once I started writing with that
idea, a first draft cam