David Henry Hwang returns to Broadway with a trojan horse of a play titled Yellow Face, now playing at the Todd Haimes Theatre. On one hand, the play is about the performance of race. On the very same hand, it is about fathers and sons. An attack concealed in an offering; a gift masked as a strike — with enough sleight of hand and deception to make an ever-suffering and crafty Odysseus proud (also in the business of returning, with unfinished business with his son). Ultimately, the play is about life and death and the alchemy that transforms theater’s ephemerality to make someone and something live forever.
Nearly twenty years after its 2007 Off-Broadway premiere at The Public Theater, the Broadway production of Yellow Face pulls its spectators back to the 1990s, a shadow history of our present moment. The play recounts the highs and lows of its main character DHH —a Tony-Award winning Asian American playwright who is a thinly-veiled stand-in for the show’s actual author, Hwang. Spanning about a decade, the play offers an entry point into the “Culture Wars” of the era, the struggles over conflicting views about American cultural identity, and ideological battles over inequality.
The discourse on race, class, and gender is eerily familiar. Multiculturalism is a cover for old racisms. The practice of yellowface persists. Dog whistles abound. All while playing out in a larger geopolitical landscape of capitalism and US militarism. The keenest marker that times have changed is the notion that theater, whether a show opens or closes, and battles over casting commanded national attention in print media.
With the 1988 Broadway production of M. Butterfly, Hwang gained the title of first Asian American playwright produced on Broadway. That he also won the Tony Award for Best Play with that production, cemented the trailblazing epithet. Since then, he has been the most visible Asian American theater artist for the past thirty-five years. Heavy is the head that wears such a crown. The weight of this responsibility propels the plot of Yellow Face.
Fresh off the success of his Tony Award-winning play M. Butterfly, the fictional DHH (played by Daniel Dae Kim) enters a new decade, the 1990s, and the next phase of his career, optimistic for the possibilities ahead. At first, he relishes his new role as the voice of Asian America, protesting yellowface casting in Miss Saigon of the Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce as Engineer, a Eurasian brothel owner. The public face of the protest, DHH has reservations, especially when Actors’ Equity rescinds its decision to bar Pryce. Still, he is inspired to write a new play about yellowface casting and mistaken racial identities.
History repeats itself. Perhaps first as tragedy in Miss Saigon but definitely here as farce. In a comedy of errors, DHH unwittingly casts a white actor (Ryan Eggold) in his search for an Asian American leading man. To save face, DHH then doubles down. Cowed by an audience of Asian American college students (fellow cast members Francis Jue and Shannon Tyo, in particular, are hilarious collegiate caricatures), DHH changes the actor’s name from Marcus G. Dalhman to Marcus Gee. He exploits the students’ race-conscious savvy to reject phenotype and acknowledge interracial intimacies, inventing ancestors for Marcus who were “Russian Siberian Asian Jews.” With a new name and lineage, Marcus gains a sense of belonging and purpose. DHH fires Marcus from Face Value, which is (and was in real life) a Broadway flop. Gee’s ironic rise in Asian America plagues DHH, but the focus of the play shifts, though DHH is still hung up on Gee, who is now dating an Asian American activist, an ex of DHH’s.
Yellow Face deceptively cycles through several forms: mockumentary, verbatim theater, satire, but, ultimately, it lands on elegy. The first movement of the play leans heavily into its docudrama cred with Arnulfo Maldonado’s set, Lap Chi Chu’s lighting design, and Yee Eun Nam’s projections filling the theater with a depthless black illuminated by shifting white boxes and projected newspaper articles. Characters either step into or out of these boxes. Director Leigh Silverman, a longtime collaborator of Hwang’s and the original director of the off-Broadway iteration, approaches this part of the script efficiently, but it feels too contained.
That being said, ensemble members Kevin Del Aguila, Marinda Anderson, and especially the aforementioned Tyo (making her Broadway debut) work to push past the restraint — especially when cross-racially playing real-life figures from then Vice President Al Gore to pioneer of Asian American theater, Frank Chin. They move effortlessly between roles, genres, and staging conventions. Their stage presence and the precision of their performances reveal what theater actors do best and what audiences who come to Broadway expect: acting that impacts all 740 seats.
The show’s leads, Daniel Dae Kim and Ryan Eggold, give passable performances. In many ways, Daniel Dae Kim is the Asian American leading man DHH thinks he is looking for when he casts Marcus Gee, rather than the craven narcissist that the character is. Kim never comfortably commands the stage, but delivers his strongest performance in a sit-down scene with the delightfully abrasive Greg Keller as a baiting journalist whose name is “Withheld on Advice of Counsel.” Strength, however, gains new meaning the moment lights come up on Francis Jue as HYH, DHH’s father, a prominent Los Angeles banker, who started the first federally chartered Asian American bank in fiction and reality.
Jue is resplendent as HYH, drawing our eyes, ears, and hearts with charm and a sincerity that grounds the play. Anita Yavitch’s costumes revel in pattern-on-pattern whether HYH is a gentleman-in-repose or a man of finance. While reprising the role, he is a revelation, so it feels right that the story about HYH takes over the play. The second movement of Yellow Face centers HYH, reframing the way we understand racism and representation. How HYH becomes a suspect in the eyes of the media and US government —which Hwang mirrors in the story of Taiwanese American scientist Wen Ho Lee, also presented in the play—is where the personal and political stakes emerge.
Thus, the lightly-masked metatheatrical docudrama gives way to elegy. Hwang lost his father to cancer in 2005 during the initial drafting of the play. In Yellow Face, he reimagines his father. In doing so, HYH lives on indelibly. Hwang even offers HYH the impossible act of reading his own obituary and exiting into the upper recesses of stage with his head held high. Rather than dying every performance, perhaps broken when his American dream shatters, HYH instead lives on, always doing so “[his] way,” a nod to the Frank Sinatra song that is HYH’s anthem. If real and fake are mixed up in the play, then so is life and theater.
--
Yellow Face is running now on Broadway at the Todd Haimes Theatre.
