David Henry Hwang’s new work, Soft Power

Crazy Rich Asians‘ Henry Golding plays a carpet-bagging Chinese media executive eager to copy Hollywood influence

Amidst the hoopla surrounding Crazy Rich Asians, the current film adaptation of Kevin Kwan’s chick lit novel by the same, a new musical by acclaimed playwright David Henry Hwang has gone somewhat unnoticed.  Crazy Rich Asians is hyped as the first major film release in 25 years to star a predominately Asian American cast, and in a time of unusually vocal activism regarding Asian and Asian American representation in entertainment media, the movie is justly recognized as a cultural and industrial landmark.  Yet Soft Power, Hwang’s new musical that premiered earlier this year in Los Angeles, is also significant as a major stage production featuring an almost exclusively Asian American cast (the play even stars Henry Golding, Crazy Rich Asian’s dreamy lead).  So although musical theater may not have the wide visibility of a feature film, Soft Power deserves similar attention both for its racial inclusion as well as the explicit discussion of such issues that Crazy Rich Asians addresses only implicitly.

Soft Power—or ruǎn shílì, as we are repeatedly told in the musical’s second half—examines modern China’s desire to match its current political and economic power with pop cultural influence, just as Hollywood manifested U.S. global might throughout the twentieth century.  China’s explicit pursuit of this goal is widely known within the nation and throughout the world as “soft power,” a term originally posited in the late 1980s by Harvard-based foreign affairs and policy consultant Joseph Nye and now widely used by Chinese leaders themselves.  In Hwang’s work, soft power is imagined through the opening premise of Hwang collaborating with a Chinese bureaucrat to develop a TV series featuring young, attractive, modern protagonists who still live their lives by traditional Chinese values (such as the fictional “I Will Stick with My Mistake,” a supposedly uplifting romance about choosing fidelity over adultery that the Chinese bureaucrat praises to the disbelieving Hwang).  Although Hwang—whose long and acclaimed career has always centered upon Asian identity and western misunderstanding—is eager to explore possibilities and sympathetic to the cause, he balks at the bureaucrat’s faith that global audiences could be drawn to dutiful characters who choose propriety over individual happiness.  As Hwang’s fictionalized representative puts it, the American part of him believes in the freedom to err and to fail, and discovery of his married Chinese colleague’s affair with a blonde Bernie Sanders-supporting millennial only seems to corroborate Hwang’s critique.

Perhaps it’s this belief in the humanity of fallibility that accounts for Soft Power’s engaging messiness, which launches multiple threads in a variety of different directions without sufficiently resolving any. Hwang has always been a deeply referential and self-reflexive dramatist, seeding his work with incisive and wide-ranging intertextual references driven by assertive cultural critique.  Soft Power continues this legacy in virtuoso staging and scripting choices that leap decades into the future, convert the politicized blonde love interest into a fantasized Hillary Clinton, and incorporate fourth wall-breaking references to Hwang’s 2015 stabbing by a still unknown assailant alongside jokey insider gags that range from passing parodies of Oklahoma! and the 2016 film La La Land to a sustained send-up of colonial romance in Broadway classic, The King and I.  Yet unlike Hwang’s acclaimed earlier works like F.O.B., Chinglish and the Tony award-winning breakthrough M. Butterfly—all of which subvert and explode racial and cultural assumptions until stereotypes collapse into a perspectival mise en abîme—Soft Power’s many dazzling ideas sparkle only to extinguish as suddenly as they appear.  Is Soft Power about the hypocrisies of moral righteousness?  The insidious effectiveness of entertainment media and its coarsening effect on democratic discourse?  Who knows, when national and international leadership is as unpredictable as it is today?

And what about Soft Power’s hype as a “radical idea” for its almost entirely Asian American cast?  To start, the claim is misleading, as just a few years ago Broadway hosted Allegiance, about Japanese internment, and Flower Drum Song, a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, was a major success upon its original production in 1958, adapted into a 1961 film, and even rewritten and readapted for Broadway in 2001 by Hwang himself.  That such amnesia occurs around otherwise high profile productions demonstrates the continuing problems that hamper Asian and Asian American representation in global entertainment media.  That is, as our faces and identities remain such a media novelty that every occurrence is an opportunity for celebration, that very emphasis upon political progress paradoxically detracts from a work’s artistic merit.

To put it in very contemporary terms, Asian Americans are still awaiting their Black Panther moment, when a major pop cultural production depicts our racial identity and bicultural rhythms with the visceral enthusiasm that makes Hollywood-style soft power so effective.  Is Crazy Rich Asians capable of addressing what Hwang’s work explores?  Despite its current box office success, Crazy Rich Asians is only a fraction of Black Panther’s earnings at this same point in its run, and one wonders if Crazy Rich Asians’ genre of romantic comedy can exert the same kind of mass audience transformation with which Black Panther has been credited.  This makes Soft Power, by contrast, all the more interesting.  Even with its unresolved through lines and less accessible form of stage production, Soft Power has political and critical ambitions that a consumerist confection like Crazy Rich Asians does not.  Rather like Hamilton, the blockbuster Broadway musical that audaciously casts people of color in roles representing America’s Founding Fathers, Soft Power reconceptualizes received history by formally acknowledging the central role that immigrants and racial and ethnic others played in that consecrated past.  Soft Power may not have the lyric and musical complexity of Hamilton, but in its waggish confrontation with US-Chinese geopolitics Hwang riffs on the same issues of modern day racial-cultural perception that Black Panther and Hamilton both upend.  As Hwang’s fictionalized alter ego, “DHH,” wryly observes at the end of Soft Power, sometimes “feeling like an outsider in a [place] built by outsiders” is precisely what one needs to prepare oneself for present uncertainty.

After completing its premiere run in Los Angeles, Soft Power also played in San Francisco.