David Henry Hwang’s “Yellow Face” is a difficult play to review. The playwright has made himself the lead character, and he fills this semi-autobiographical story with lots of other real names, from Ed Koch to Frank Rich, and he quotes from them. But the play’s bad guy is completely made up, and Hwang doesn’t reveal this fact until its end. Hwang is clever to the extreme in his deceptions.
To the credit of director Leigh Silverman and actor Daniel Dae Kim, the first Broadway revival of “Yellow Face,” which opened Tuesday at Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theater, plays much more as a broad farce than it did in its New York City debut in 2007 at the Public Theater. Anulfo Maldonado’s set and Anita Yavich’s costumes even give a day-time TV-game-show look to the story of this playwright’s biggest failure, a 1993 play titled “Face Value.”
In “Yellow Face,” Hwang (Kim) is writing “Face Value” in response to the yellow-face casting of Jonathan Pryce in the first Broadway production of “Miss Saigon,” in 1991. Having written “M. Butterfly,” the first play by an Asian American to open on Broadway, in 1988, Hwang has some clout, causing Cameron Mackintosh to cancel the “Miss Saigon” production. The British producer even uses the offensive word “Oriental” in his public statement. Hwang is an important voice in the dispute – until he suddenly isn’t. “Miss Saigon” opens pretty much on schedule, with Pryce going on to win a Tony for his portrayal of a Eurasian owner of a Saigon brothel.
At an audition for “Face Value,” Hwang wants to cast an actor, Marcus G. Dahlman (Ryan Eggold), but others involved in the production don’t think this actor “looks Asian” enough to play an Asian character. Hwang freaks out, calling it racist to think that all people of Asian descent have a particular look. At the Public Theater in 2007, this scene was dead serious, with Hwang race-shaming the casting director and producer. On Broadway, this scene is played for laughs, and Kim comes off as more than a little obsessed about his racial identity.
But problems remain with the scene beyond the fact that the real “Face Value” in 1993 was cast with Mark Linn-Baker and BD Wong, not a white actor named Marcus who was passing for Asian. Is this a problem in the theater: white actors passing themselves off as Asian or Black to enhance their career? Here’s where “Yellow Face” gets tricky. Hwang is making a couple of points here: one, white actors in the past (Pryce being a prime example) did profit from doing yellow face and Black face; and two, Marcus is using yellow face much as Hwang’s father (the delightful Francis Jue) has used white face to become a multi-millionaire immigrant banker living in Los Angeles. The poster for this revival of “Yellow Face” uses an illustration of Daniel Dae Kim holding a mask of his own face. Is Hwang telling us that Asian Americans sometimes wear a yellow mask to further their career? Hwang the character, if not the playwright, is a victim pure and simple.
The casting scene in “Yellow Face” raises questions that Hwang doesn’t address. “Miss Saigon” isn’t the only show that has had casting authenticity problems. Let’s take “M. Butterfly,” which in its two Broadway productions, among many other incarnations, has cast cis actors in the role of Song Liling, a character that is clearly transgender.
While “Yellow Face” derives some humor from Hwang’s obsessiveness, the character isn’t being funny when he rejects a gay actor because the playwright is looking for someone who is “masculine.” This discussion gets caught up in all the tropes that white people have about Asian men not being masculine or sexy. Simultaneously, Hwang (the character and the playwright) is promoting all the tropes that straight people have about gay men not being masculine or sexy. Has Hwang’s victim status, as well as his hetero gaze, blinded him to looking beyond his own life experience?
The play’s best-written scenes take place between Hwang and his father, a successful banker in Los Angeles who prizes material success over all else, and that includes his son’s moral posturing. “Miss Saigon” is a big hit and Hwang Sr. wants to see it, especially the “classy” half-naked Vietnamese girls playing prostitutes. According to “Yellow Face,” the white face that Hwang Sr. wears belongs to Jimmy Stewart, whom the banker adores. Then Hwang Sr. gets caught up in a Senate investigation regarding his bank’s ties to China. The usual real-life yahoo Republican bigots are quoted verbatim with the usual central-casting Southern accents.
As “Yellow Face” tells it, the Senate investigation probably gave Hwang Sr. cancer, even though he was never called to testify, and the old man became so disillusioned by the experience that he refused alternate therapies and died at age 77 cursing the country that had made him a millionaire many times over.
First off, Henry Yuan Hwang, the founder of Far East National Bank, made a lot more money than Jimmy Stewart ever dreamed of. Second, in the playwright’s telling of his father’s supposedly tragic story, he leaves out an important episode, such as the following paragraph from Henry Yuan Hwang’s obit in the New York Times:
“In 1989, Mr. Hwang was at the center of a major scandal in Los Angeles when it was disclosed that he had hired Tom Bradley, then the mayor, as a consultant. Mr. Bradley had also received a loan from the bank and appeared to have helped it secure $2 million in deposits of city funds.”
And that’s the other problem with reviewing “Yellow Face.” Hwang the playwright has set up his drama so that we distrust even the news media and their accounts of Asian Americans. It is a reporter (Greg Keller) from the Times who leads the investigation of Far East National Bank. In his cameo, Keller delivers one of the best performances I’ve seen on stage this year, because he succeeds brilliantly in turning a cardboard villain into something that resembles a human being.
Throughout “Yellow Face,” Silverman uses her talented cast to play all sorts of characters, and the nontraditional casting often delivers a great deal of laughter. It’s fun to see a female actor of color playing a redneck Senator from the South. When Hwang wants to get serious, however, Silverman doesn’t mess around. She casts an actor who looks male and white in the role of the reporter. Oh, can I write that someone looks white and male? Keller also plays the role without a smidgen of the campy gay face that infects some of the other performances. White straight men have become the go-to villains in the theater. Apparently, some stereotypes remain PC.
“Yellow Face” spares us the fascist line “fake news,” but like so many liberal-minded writers in the theater, Hwang is anything but progressive when it comes to journalism, one of the bulwarks of democracy. The playwright is in good company. Recent works by Jason Robert Brown (“The Connector”) and Lynn Nottage (“MJ”) have turned a reporter into the villain. Hwang’s reporter is especially egregious because elsewhere the playwright has loaded “Yellow Face” with real names spouting real quotes. The reporter character, oddly, remains anonymous. Hwang handles the Times articles as if some court judge or Senate committee chairman had redacted them, including the reporter’s name. No, Hwang redacted them and he doesn’t tell us why.
When it comes to being a reporter, Hwang has a pretty spotty track record, one that flies in the face of how much “Yellow Face” is used to bolster the sagging reputation of “M. Butterfly.” The playwright rewrote his story and used as his new source material the 1993 nonfiction book “Liaison: The Real Story of the Affair that Inspired M. Butterfly,” written by New York Times reporter Joyce Wadler, whom Hwang did not credit in that show’s Playbill in 2017. The Tony-winning play, Hwang’s masterpiece, closed after 61 regular performances.
