About the Play:

Nominated for 1998 Tony Award and Winner of the 1997 Obie Award

Golden Child is a full-length drama by David Henry Hwang. Ahn, the "golden child" of a polygamous Chinese man, tells her grandson stories of her father's shift toward Western ways, and the effect of this shift on their household. Inspired by his own family history, David Henry Hwang's 1997 Obie Award-winning and 1998 Tony nominated Golden Child explores the often-painful process through which change comes to people and cultures.

Golden Child concerns a Chinese businessman who returns home after working abroad and "sets off a dangerous power struggle in his polygamous Chinese household. In the winter of 1918, progressive Chinese landowner Eng Tieng-Bin's interest in Westernization and Christianity sets off a power struggle among his three wives, which will determine the future of his daughter, Ahn, Tieng-Bin's favourite, his "golden child." Drawing on true stories told by his maternal Chinese grandmother, David Henry Hwang has created his most personal and emotional work to date, invoking the age in which his great grandfather broke with Confucian tradition by converting to Christianity and unbinding his daughter's feet. Performed in San Francisco, downtown Manhattan and Singapore before opening on Broadway, Golden Child explores the impact of these decisions on each of the great grandfather's three wives and on succeeding generations.

Golden Child premiered in 1996 off-Broadway at the Joseph Papp Public Theater and won a 1997 Obie Award for Playwriting, then moved in 1998 to Broadway at the Longacre Theatre, where it received a Tony Nomination for Best Play. Since then the play had regional premieres at professional theatres across the US.

Cast: 4 female, 2 male, plus 3 any gender

What people say:

"There is a quiet though highly theatrical intelligence at work in Golden Child…The play is composed of many…small moments of grace, which are not often seen on our stages, certainly not on Broadway." — The New York Times

"An undoubtedly personal work … Hwang has a lovely time contrasting differences in culture, gender, generation and religion…." — Variety

About the Playwright:

David Henry Hwang is a Chinese American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter, described by The New York Times as "a true original" and by TIME magazine as "the first important dramatist of American public life since Arthur Miller." Throughout his career, he has explored the complexities of forging Eastern and Western cultures in a contemporary America. His extraordinary body of work, over the past 30 years, has been marked by a deep desire to reaffirm the common humanity in all of us. He is best known as the author of M. Butterfly, which won the 1988 Tony, Drama Desk, John Gassner, and Outer Critics Circle Awards, and was also a finalist for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize. In 2012, he won the $200,000 US Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, the richest theatre prize in the U.S.