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. “Asians have consistently been caricatured, denied the right even to play ourselves,” he says while accepting his Tony Award for Best Play. “Well, it’s a new day in America. We’re entering the 1990s, and all that stops now!” The 1990s have other plans. Soon DHH is leading protests against the casting of the white actor Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian pimp in the megamusical Miss Saigon. When that doesn’t quite pan out, the playwright—flush with activist self-regard and who-you-calling-yellow? bravado—uses the imbroglio as the inspiration for Face Value. But in a savagely ironic twist, his efforts to find “a straight, masculine Asian leading man” for his farce lead him to inadvertently cast a white actor, Marcus (an affectingly sincere Ryan Eggold), in Face Value’s central part.
Hwang has given Yellow Face a minor facelift since the original New York production. It’s good work: Minus its intermission and a few inessential scenes, the play seems tauter and smoother, but not unnaturally so; its wrinkles and laugh lines remain. Kim, whose only previous Broadway experience was a brief stint in the King and I role originated by the non-Asian Yul Brynner, capably holds the show’s center as DHH, with an appealing layer of fluster behind his veneer of success. Three versatile actors—Marinda Anderson, Shannon Tyo and Some Like It Hot’s expert Kevin Del Aguila—fill out the many minor roles, often playing against ethnic type; these include quick, insider-y sketches of real-life journalists, activists, theater creators and performers (such as BD Wong, Margaret Cho and Jane Krakowski).
Yellow Face | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
The cast also includes one holdover from Yellow Face’s 2007 production: the irreplaceable Francis Jue in a heart-bursting turn as Hwang’s father, Henry (or HYH), an immigrant banker still giddy at the breadth of American possibility. “When I was working in a laundry, could I ever have dreamed?” he marvels, “That one day Charlton Heston would write about my son?” This role becomes pivotal as Hwang shifts the play from cringe comedy—Marcus finds purpose within his assumed Asian identity and DHH tries to save his own skin—to more dramatic concerns. As in real life, HYH is accused, on scant evidence, of secretly acting on behalf of the Chinese government. The New York Times reporter who destroys his reputation, played by a wormy Greg Keller, does the same to the Chinese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee (Jue again), who spent months in solitary confinement on false charges of treason; DHH has a consequential encounter with this reporter, who is identified only as “[Name Withheld On Advice of Counsel]” but, psst, is clearly modeled on Jeff Gerth.
The point of Yellow Face’s mix of metatheatrical comedy and docudrama feels even clearer now that the intermission is gone: The ongoing discussion about representation matters, however flawed it may be, because it complicates larger narratives that too often still determine how Asian-Americans get treated. Behind the reporter’s gray mask of respectability, Hwang suggests, is just yellow journalism, recycling the same old yellow peril. No matter how American DHH’s father may be, some will still only see him as inherently alien and suspect; if he’s no longer doing laundry, he must be laundering money. Within that context, every chance Asian-American artists get to tell their own stories—even insular ones of foolishness and compromise—is a step to the future, face forward.
Yellow Face. Todd Haimes Theatre (Broadway). By David Henry Hwang. Directed by Leigh Silverman. With Daniel Dae Kim, Francis Jue, Ryan Eggold, Kevin Del Aguila, Marinda Anderson, Shannon Tyo, Greg Keller. Running time: 1hr 45mins. No intermission.
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Yellow Face | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus