Yellow Face
Broadway review by Adam Feldman
The 1988 production of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly made him, at that time, the only man of East Asian descent ever to write a Broadway play. More than 35 years have gone by since then, and now Hwang is…still the only man of East Asian descent ever to write a Broadway play. There is now one woman in that category as well, Young Jean Lee (Straight White Men), but the burden of representation has fallen largely on him. And represent he has: not just with the Pulitzer Prize–winning M. Butterfly and several musicals, but also with the plays Face Value, Golden Child and Chinglish—and, now, the queasy-entertaining, quasi-autobiographical Yellow Face, whose very subject is Asian representation in the theater and beyond.
Leigh Silverman, who directed the New York premiere of Yellow Face at the Public Theater in 2007, also helms its Broadway debut for Roundabout Theatre Company; Hwang’s onstage version of himself, DHH, is played by Daniel Dae Kim, the surpassingly good-looking Korean-American star of TV’s Lost and Hawaii Five-0. This is Hollywood glow-up casting indeed—when Kim makes his entrance, his cheekbones literally cast shadows on his face—but the play’s self-flattery ends there. There are targets aplenty in Yellow Face, both serious and satirical, but Hwang aims his sharpest darts straight into the mirror.
Yellow Face | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
The play begins in 1988, as DHH is flying high on M. Butterfly’s gossamer wings. “Asian