Yellow Face

The lines between truth and fiction blur with hilarious and moving results in David Henry Hwang’s unreliable memoir ...

Asian-American playwright DHH, fresh from his Tony Award win for M. Butterfly, leads a protest against the casting of Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian pimp in the original Broadway production of Miss Saigon, condemning the practice as “yellowface”

His position soon comes back to haunt him when he mistakes a Caucasian actor, Marcus G. Dahlman, for mixed-race, and casts him in the lead Asian role of his own Broadway-bound comedy, Face Value

When DHH discovers the truth of Marcus’ ethnicity, he tries to conceal his blunder to protect his reputation as an Asian-American role model, by passing the actor off as a “Siberian Jew”

Meanwhile, DHH’s father, Henry Y. Hwang, an immigrant who loves the American Dream and Frank Sinatra, finds himself ensnared in the same web of late-1990’s anti-Chinese paranoia that also leads to the “Donorgate” scandal and the arrest of Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee

As he clings to his old multicultural rhetoric, this new racist witch hunt forces DHH to confront the complex and ever-changing role that “face” plays in American life today

“ is that rarity in theater, a pungent play of ideas with a big heart. Picaresque tale brings to the national discussion about race three much-needed commodities: a sense of humor a mile wide, an even-handed treatment and a hopeful, healing vision of a world that could be” ~ Variety

“Fabulously inventive. Hwang offers hard-won lessons about leading a public life with personal integrity” ~ The New Yorker

“Charming, touching and cunningly organized as well as funny. A mordant, reflective comedy that works not only as a personal summation but as a pattern for us all as we pick our cautious way through the thicket of claims and counterclaims that marks America’s transactions with its minorities” ~ Village Voice