David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face is a cheeky, admirably self-critical, deservedly decorated drama from 2007 (Obie Award, Pulitzer finalist) about the political, emotional and artistic traps of identity politics. It’s now receiving its first Broadway run and first New York revival, with the same fine director who staged its premiere at the Public Theater 17 years ago, Leigh Silverman. Silverman has once again cast it splendidly, kept its uncountable plot-balls fluidly aloft, and wisely brightened and expanded it to fill the larger venue of the Todd Haimes Theater. The work’s complexity and intelligence are particularly welcome a month before a nerve-wracking election in which shameless major candidates whose viability would have been unthinkable in 2007 wear their bigotry on their sleeves while trafficking recklessly in dog whistles and slurs.
Some consider Yellow Face Hwang’s magnum opus, but this excellent production reminds me that it isn’t nearly as endearing or inviting as many of his other plays. It’s driven much more by barbed backchat, avoidable mistakes and irritation-humor than, say, The Dance and the Railroad, M. Butterfly, or the underappreciated musical Soft Power, which all couch their equally searching musings on ethnic identity in love stories, coming-of-age tales, and other heartful emotional frames. Yellow Face’s fun is grittier and chewier.
It’s also a slyer piece of writing than is often noticed. Grounded in news quotes and selected tidbits from Hwang’s actual life and career, it mixes fiction with fact in tricky ways that both focus and blur its social and self-critiques. Hwang once called this work “a kind of unreliable memoir.” Critics have likened it to mockumentary, parody, and in one case “fictional autoethnography” (a social science term). The genre debate is a fitting backdrop for the slippery story about identity and labels. Yellow Face’s emphasis is on doubt, not pride, on equivocation, not certainty. Its protagonist—a famous playwright named DHH—declares near the end that his prime aim has been “to take words like ‘Asian’ and ‘American,’ like ‘race’ and ‘nation’ [and] mess them up so bad no one has any idea what they even mean anymore.”
DHH (also the name of Hwang’s alter ego in Soft Power) shares a lot with the author to begin with. At the opening, he’s struggling with a writer’s block following the smash success of M. Butterfly in 1988. The actor BD Wong (M. Butterfly’s star) urges him to support the 1990 American protests against the Broadway transfer of the London hit Miss Saigon, due to its yellow-face casting of the white actor Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian pimp. That setup prepares us to see partisan advocacy as droopy DHH’s possible new source of uplift. That’s not what happens. DHH accepts Wong’s proposal but then cools to the advocacy, with Hwang deliciously evoking the whole range of huffy certainties from that heady moment with a flurry of quotes from the likes of Ed Koch, Dick Cavett, Pravda, Frank Rich, Cameron Mackintosh, and many, many others. The glib remarks all either back or attack Actors’ Equity’s initial support of the protest or its subsequent decision to let Pryce perform: “the trendy racism of Actors’ Equity,” “the bonehead decision of the year,” “this is a tempest in an Oriental teapot.”
After this documentary opening, fiction takes over Yellow Face with a farcical flourish. DHH channels his Miss Saigon experience in a satirical play called Face Value that ignominiously flops after being rushed to Broadway following a shaky Boston tryout. That is true of the real Hwang too, but in Yellow Face, Face Value brings still more embarrassment. DHH makes the bizarre decision—either from haste, obliviousness, denial, or something else, it’s never clear—to cast a white guy named Marcus Dahlman as “a masculine Asian leading man” in his play. He swats away his colleagues’ demurrals with the remark, “Asian faces come in a variety of shapes and sizes.” Then, when he does learn the truth, he doubles down by publicly floating a cover story that Marcus is “a Siberian Jew.”
Marcus (played here by Ryan Eggold) goes on to use that cover as a meal ticket, becoming a famous “Asian” acting star and beloved community advocate—a monster of cultural appropriation who swats away his creator’s protests by quoting him: “You said yourself, didn’t you? It doesn’t matter what someone looks like on the outside.”
The rest of Yellow Face plays out the public and private consequences of this absurd situation, deploying its 7-member cast in such a wide variety of roles that their vivid performances unsettle all fixed perceptions of race, gender, and character type. Standout shape-shifters in Silverman’s production include: Shannon Tyo, an Asian-American actress who nails Cameron Mackintosh, Gish Jen, and the Asian-American man who loses the Face Value role to Marcus; Kevin Del Aguila, an American actor of Peruvian heritage who does dead-on cameos of Ed Koch and BD Wong; and Marina Anderson, a Black actress who hilariously channels both Al Gore and white Jane Krakowski, a star from 30 Rock.
Shoutouts should also go to Daniel Dae Kim, the hunky actor from Lost who plays DHH with shrewdly humble wryness (watch his face drop every time one of his friends calls him out on evasions), and Francis Jue, who is reprising his 2007 portrayal of DHH’s father and is even more moving now because he’s closer to the character’s age. Yellow Face is a colder play than many of Hwang’s others, but it does pack an emotional charge in intertwining its identity-farce with the story of DHH’s father, called HYH.
HYH (like Hwang’s actual father Henry Yuan Hwang) is a successful Chinese immigrant banker whose ardent love of America (he identifies with movie stars like Gary Cooper and Clark Gable) curdles when he’s caught up in the “yellow peril” congressional investigations of the late Clinton years. Hwang poignantly juxtaposes DHH’s and HYH’s stories—one a bumbling quest for meaning in various identity affiliations foisted on a famous writer, the other a painful fall from innocence by an earnest old man discovering the limits of American acceptance of Asians. In the end, DHH is so disgusted by all of it that he declares his search for his “own face” as an artist more important than any other consideration.
That individualistic, politically equivocal declaration—typically American and not entirely flattering—is not what many have wanted to recognize as the center of Yellow Face over the years. Many reviewers have picked out instead one or another of the play’s putative moral threads as its overarching point: say, Hwang’s swipes at the bigoted politicians who torment HYH (as if any politician could be shamed today by such racial scapegoating!), or his digs at the smug and anonymous New York Times reporter who tries to snare DHH in the congressional witchhunt.
The truth is, none of those threads is really central. Yellow Face is primarily a play about disappointment, self-betrayal, and not being sure, and that’s partly why it’s so disturbing. It’s an unclassifiable dramatic creature that feeds on alternative facts, grows a wacky satirical skin only to shed it, and finally leaves us without so much as a hinted reconciliation or solution to its conundrums.
Photos: Joan Marcus
By David Henry Hwang
Directed by Leigh Silverman
Todd Haimes Theater
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