Signature: What made you decide to leave out
Bruce’s later successful years in Hong Kong?
DHH: Even though his life was not that long, if
you try to tell the whole thing– which I tried to do
when I was writing musical versions of it– you
really end up having to cram a lot of stuff in.
I wanted to focus on how unlikely it was that he
achieved what he did. And therefore it felt to me
interesting to end it at a point where we don’t
know whether he’s going to be successful. Where
he could very well have been some other Asian
actor who got one big break on a TV series and
was never able to follow it up. Now of course,
because his name happens to be Bruce Lee, we
know how it ends. But you could leave this play
kind of feeling like, “Wow. He’s still got a long way
to go. Is it really going to happen?”
Signature: What’s the most surprising thing you have learned about Bruce Lee in your research?
DHH: I guess it was his Seattle years. Linda (his widow) always said that she felt those were the happiest times in his life.
I think what was surprising was the degree to which those early Kung Fu classes that he did in Seattle, they really felt like
guys hanging out. You know? They were just a bunch of misfits. Bruce was definitely the leader, but I think he identified
with them because he was a misfit too. There’s a great buddy bonding dynamic there. That was something that I gravitated to and I think that’s why so much of the show is set in Seattle.
LS: One thing that was really surprising to me and interesting to me was the way that he collected from science, from
philosophy, from different kinds of fighting, and he just mashed it all together and that collision of ideas is what
Kung Fu is. It’s actually been the inspiration for a lot of elements of this production. n
above: Johnny Wu and Jennifer Lim in
Chinglish at the Goodman Theatre, 2012.
left: B.D. Wong and John Lithgow in
M. Butterfly, 1988.
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