Yellow Face –  03 November 2024

Yellow Face dramatizes the story of playwright David Henry Hwang’s sincere efforts to expand Asian representation in theatre, efforts which go awry when he inadvertently casts a white actor in an Asian role. In an attempt not to be seen as a hypocrite, Hwang (portrayed by Daniel Dae Kim) invents the backstory placing Marcus’s (Ryan Eggold) Asian origins as “Siberian Jew“, which backfires spectacularly when Marcus enjoys the acceptance he feels from the Asian American community so much that he decides to continue representing himself as a member of it. As a production, Yellow Face draws upon the difficult ways that the world makes assumptions about race because of questions we’re not allowed to ask, and highlights the importance of not making judgments through struggling with the vital question of how to ensure cultural authenticity while also respecting the blurred lines of people who don’t fully know their origins. A serious turn toward the end in which Chinese Americans are accused of being spies for China highlights the real racial divide – when you cannot change your face. No matter what community that places you in, genuine, actual, authentic people of color, don’t have a choice to be seen as anything other than a minority.

The mechanics of the story telling were a mishmash of everything, which made it clear how many angles the playwright could use to tell this story; it really emphasized the ubiquitous nature of hostility toward Asian Americans. Some of these mechanisms, like the scenes with the father (Francis Jue) really reinforced stereotypes, while others, like Hwang’s attempt to sabotage Lea Salonga’s (portrayed by Shannon Tyo) relationship with Marcus, were meant fight them. The audience thoroughly enjoyed the realness in both.

The utilization of the ensemble cast, in which actors had to shout who was saying what and step in and out of roles in seconds made certain moments feel like throwaways. They were using projection (Yee Eun Nam) for articles already, so the choice to identify speakers verbally seemed unnecessarily difficult to follow. Certain moments just felt like the ensemble was shouting, and the significance of their storytelling got swallowed up as I was still processing who they were and why they were relevant. This did, however, emphasize the feeling of the overwhelming pervasiveness of hurtful stereotypes about Asian Americans.

At the end of the production, Hwang reveals that the pivotal character who supplied the concept for this piece (Marcus), which was the comedy of an Asian playwright who opposed yellow face confronting the consequences of inadvertantly casting a white actor in an Asian role, was fictitious. This leaves the audience with a lot of questions about the barriers the show was supposedly breaking down, like acceptance that race can be hard to determine from just a person‘s face. Why are we laughing? Is it absurd to believe yellow face could happen by accident? Or is it funny because the questions we can’t ask actually make something like this fictitious accident possible? Where does that leave us on cultural pride of being Asian or American or both or neither? Provocative and clever, Yellow Face raises excellent questions on bias and perception, with particular attention to questions like “where are you really from?” A final irony for the road: in this story, David Henry Hwang talks a lot about being a Chinese American. Daniel Dae Kim, who portrays him in the show, is Korean.

I did not attend this performance on a press pass.