YELLOW FACE Finally Makes It To Broadway — Review

Yellow Face is the rare play to begin with a plot recap: “Previously, on David Henry Hwang!” 

In a flurry, talking heads summarize the essential background info—chiefly Hwang’s work campaigning against the yellowface casting of Jonathan Pryce for the Broadway transfer of Miss Saigon, and Actors’ Equity’s (ultimately unsuccessful) push against Pryce transferring with the show to New York.

Yet before this recap is even through, Hwang has already started toying with the truth. This play’s version of the playwright and activist, dubbed “DHH” and portrayed by Daniel Dae Kim in Roundabout Theatre Company’s solid revival, backs off the campaign as public opinion begins to turn.

“I think this is starting to make us look bad,” he sputters to a fellow Asian-American activist. DHH means, of course, that he fears it will make him look bad. 

Was the real Hwang plagued by doubts? Probably not. But truth is a slippery beast in this wickedly funny, regrettably timely satire, first staged in 2007 and now given its Broadway debut at Roundabout's Todd Haimes Theatre. The play toys mischievously with real-life events, colliding reality and fiction until the two grow hard to distinguish. And though its late turn into earnestness does not quite land in Leigh Silverman’s tonally uneven staging, this revival is nonetheless thoughtful and tremendously entertaining.

The premise, enjoyably absurd, centers on Hwang’s infamous 1993 flop Face Value. Hwang imagines a sequence of misunderstandings which lead him to cast a white actor, Marcus G. Dahlman (New Amsterdam’s Ryan Eggold) in the show’s lead Asian-American role. Upon realizing his error, Hwang goes to increasingly extreme lengths to cover up his mistake, fearing public humiliation. 

Hwang masterfully dissects the impossible knots we tear ourselves into around race, cultural appropriation and narrative ownership. First it is DHH’s fear of public disdain and over-eagerness to recognize “nuance” that leads him, hilariously, into the error of casting Marcus at all. (“What exactly are ‘Asian features’?” DHH pompously questions when a casting director questions Marcus’ casting. “Short, nerdy, slanty eyes?”) Then, his own assumptions about Marcus’ motives compound the error as DHH keeps digging his hole deeper and deeper. 

Writing DHH as a self-important, pontifical buffon creates a challenge for Kim, a naturally appealing performer. Kim can certainly play darkness—his most famous character, Jin-Soo Kwon from Lost, is hardly a chipper fellow—but his DHH is never believably as huge of an asshole as the text demands. 

Kim’s natural likability is a better fit for the play's latter half, where Hwang segues inelegantly into more earnest territory. The splitting point comes when DDH sits down with a New York Times reporter (Greg Keller) pursuing a racially charged hit piece against his father, “HYH” (an excellent Francis Jue). This interview is a central pivot point, but it doesn’t really work. The journalist is too obviously a bullshitter, to the point where even the self-involved DHH couldn’t have failed to notice. 

The play then shifts gears abruptly to focus on the father’s health, creating a tonal whiplash. In its earlier stagings, Yellow Face was a two-act piece, but Hwang has rewritten it for Broadway to play without an intermission—the break might help in easing the audience into a new kind of narrative.

But when Yellow Face circles back to DHH’s bizarre dynamic with Marcus, it again finds a center. As the two find some degree of understanding, the absurdity of their tale and the weight of Hwang’s ideas find a strange, surprising balance.

Yellow Face is now in performance on Broadway at the Todd Haimes Theatre in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.