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David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face debuted Off Broadway 17 years ago, spinning a farcical tale about a real-life Broadway controversy that had taken place some 17 years before that. How it manages to be relevant, insightful and very funny as it makes its Broadway debut tonight, all these years later, is anyone’s guess, but it does.
We can start by thanking Hwang’s terrific play – cut by a half-hour since its overlong Off Broadway version – and crackerjack direction by Leigh Silverman. Perhaps most of all, the production’s appeal rests with a cast led by an excellent Daniel Dae Kim, the Lost and Avatar: The Last Airbender star making a seamless transition to the Broadway stage.
The plot is, on its surface – but only on its surface – one big inside joke for Broadway aficionados. Inspired by real events – with liberty taken – Yellow Face recounts an event that found Hwang embroiled in one of the rare Broadway scandals catchy enough to break through to the outside world. Still riding high on the acclaim and popularity of his masterwork M. Butterfly, Hwang, in 1990, became linked to another Broadway production, but only through his opposition: Miss Saigon, the Cameron Mackintosh-produced musical that had been a hit on London’s West End with the Welsh (and white) actor Jonathan Pryce in a lead role as a Eurasian pimp, was about to transfer to Broadway with Pryce in tow.
The casting of a white man in an Asian role – “yellow face” – drew ire from New York’s Asian acting community, with Hwang and his M. Butterfly star B.D. Wong in the forefront of the protests. Mackintosh huffily canceled the transfer, though after some back-and-forth with Actors’ Equity a deal was brokered in which Pryce would perform (minus the yellow face make-up and eye prosthetics. Let that sink in: yellow face and eye prosthetics) and with the promise that future recasts would tap into the city’s Asian acting community.
So, that all happened, as did the massive flop of Hwang’s M. Butterfly follow-up Face Value, a farce loosely based on the Saigon brouhaha in which fictional white actors play fictional Asian characters in a play within the play. The Broadway production of Face Value closed in previews, joining the notorious ranks of all-time worst Broadway flops.
From all that comes Yellow Face, in which Hwang comically recounts that ordeal with one big made-up addition: While Face Value dealt with issues of race in art, cultural appropriation and anti-Asian bigotry, the play did not star a white actor initially mistaken by the playwright to be Asian. When Hwang, or, rather “DHH” as his character is called in Yellow Face, learns that his not-Asian actor is, in fact, not Asian, DHH schemes up a backstory – the actor is, DHH insists, Asian-ish, a “Siberian Jew,” which sounds just amorphous enough to fool the rubes inside and outside the industry – to prevent scandal before Face Value gets its Broadway opening.
As in all good farce, DHH’s scheme begins to unravel when his white actor Marcus (a funny and sweetly earnest Ryan Eggold) decides he rather likes being Asian. He certainly enjoys the cast camaraderie, and the sense of belonging when the Asian acting community, fooled by that “Siberian Jew” nonsense, embraces him as a sort of avatar of the New Asian who doesn’t necessarily conform to age-old stereotypes or Western-defined characteristics.
So that’s the first half of Yellow Face – what would have been Act I if the intermission was still in place. From there, the comedy takes a darker turn, when a political contribution made by a well-meaning Marcus to a Chinese-American politician falls under the scrutiny of the FBI. The great Chinese Influence scare of the late 1990s has arrived, with the FBI and The New York Times coming down hard on folks like Wen Ho Lee, the Chinese-American nuclear scientist who was imprisoned on suspicion of spying, and even Hwang’s own father, here called HYH but in real life Henry Y. Hwang (beautifully and poignantly played by Francis Jue), the CEO of California’s Far East National Bank who becomes falsely accused of money laundering for China.
By this point in the play, the earlier farce of the theater shenanigans has morphed into the higher-stakes bigotry of the falsely convicted Wen Ho Lee and the ruthless hounding of Hwang’s father. (For the record, the New York Times‘ misguided hound dog reporter goes unnamed with a projected “Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel” by way of explanation; he and the entire sad affair is a quick Google search away).
While Hwang has no sympathy for the racists who, it’s implied, drove his beloved father to, if not an early grave, then at least an unhappy end, neither does he go easy on himself. It was his own carelessness and corner-cutting that led to his hiring a white man in an Asian role, and his ambition and Broadway greed that had him doubling-down (i.e., lying) long after he knew better, a lie that, in the farce’s telling, betrayed his own much-touted ideals and tipped matters into the dicey realm of unintended consequences.
But, of course, as both Daniel Dae Kim and Ryan Eggold, breaking the fourth wall, explain to the audience, the Marcus character is a fiction created just for Yellow Face, and we’re left to ponder what, exactly, its creation is meant to tell us about the real-life events we’re just seen re-created. Hwang seems to be suggesting that a line can indeed be drawn from the cultural tempests – too easily dismissed as matters of political correctness – to the real-world tragedies and obscenities that send innocent men to jail and early graves.
If Yellow Face doesn’t quite draw those lines with enough clarity and conviction, it nonetheless gets us thinking. And it must be said, laughing: The show is funny, and not just for the theater crowd – though there’s much here to tickle those in-the-know funny bones, what with ’90s-era references to Frank Rich and Michael Riedel and Mark Linn-Baker and Jane Krakowski and Bernie Jacobs and Joe Papp and “On Stage, And Off.”
But even if you don’t know the Boston Phoenix from the Boston Red Sox, the farcical elements and an excellent cast will keep you smiling. In addition to Kim, Eggold and Jue, the cast includes Kevin Del Aguila, Marinda Anderson, Greg Keller and Shannon Tyo, most playing (terrifically) a variety of characters and ethnicities.
With its minimalist sets by David Korins; era-appropriate costumes by Myung Hee Cho; and dreamy lighting (Donald Holder) and sound (Darron L. West) hinting at the time-hopping requirements of a memory play, Silverman’s smoothly directed production is likely the final say on this long-in-coming play and a decades-old theater world brouhaha. David Henry Hwang and Yellow Face get the well-deserved last laughs.
Title: Yellow Face
Venue: Broadway’s Todd Haimes Theatre
Written By: David Henry Hwang
Directed By: Leigh Silverman
Cast: Daniel Dae Kim, Kevin Del Aguila, Ryan Eggold, Francis Jue, Marinda Anderson, Greg Keller, Shannon Tyo
Running time: 1 hr 45 min (no intermission)
