At the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Broadway house, the Todd Haimes, Leigh Silverman skillfully directs David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face, a smart farce taking on political correctness, racial identity, media frenzy, and theatrical and journalistic conventions. The play has taken on richer depths and subtler ironies since it was presented Off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 2007. A clever mixing of fact and fiction, Yellow Face skewers every participant in our raging cultural wars, including the author himself. The action starts when the semi-autobiographical figure DHH gets involved with the controversy over white actor Jonathan Pryce playing the Asian role of The Engineer in the Broadway transfer of the West End megahit Miss Saigon in 1991. (This was probably the most infamous and controversial example of the title practice of casting non-Asians in Asian parts.)
DHH later writes About Face, a comedy satirizing the situation and inadvertently casts white Jewish actor Marcus in the lead Asian role, mistakenly believing the actor has the same ethnic background as the character. From there, DHH and his banker father HYH, a Chinese immigrant in love with the image of America, become embroiled in a scandal involving the Chinese and US governments, spies, money laundering, nuclear secrets and anti-Asian racism. Hwang has a lot to say about all these topics and says them with stingy wit. Silverman’s rapid-fire staging keeps the complex action clear, aided by Arnulfo Maldonado’s fluid set of mobile cubes and Lap Chi Chu’s multiple-location lighting.
Daniel Dae Kim combines comedic timing and dramatic pathos as the central figure DHH, hilariously attempting to justify the playwright’s shifting stances in a constantly changing cultural landscape. Francis Jue repeats his performance of HYH from the 2007 production, endearingly capturing the father’s grandiose dreams of emulating his beloved American movie stars like Jimmy Stewart.
Ryan Eggold is charismatic, charming and conflicted as the devious and slippery Marcus. In an ironic stroke of casting genius a company of able, versatile actors—Marinda Anderson, Greg Keller, Shannon Tyo and Kevin Del Aguila—play all the remaining roles without regard to age, ethnicity or gender.
