His next play Rich Relations, was his first full-length to feature non-Asian characters. It premiered at the Second Stage Theatre in New York.[10]
Hwang's best-known play was M. Butterfly, which premiered on Broadway in 1988. The play is a deconstruction of Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly,[11] alluding to news reports of the 20th-century relationship between French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu, a male Chinese opera singer. Shi purportedly convinced Boursicot that he was a woman throughout their twenty-year relationship.[12] The play won numerous awards for Best Play: a Tony Award (which Hwang was the first Asian American to win), the Drama Desk Award, the John Gassner Award, and the Outer Critics Circle Award. It was the first of three of his works to become a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.《蝴蝶夫人》，該片於1988年在百老匯首映。該劇是賈科莫·普契尼的歌劇
