Reviews for YELLOW FACE (May07)

Los Angeles Times

He has a few identity issues;
David Henry Hwang wonders what is truly authentic. Results? The play `Yellow Face.'

A writer pursues truth by any means necessary. Spinning real life into fiction -- in essence, lying with artistic intent -- is one of the oldest methods for accessing the complicated hidden meanings beneath reality's often misleading veneer.

David Henry Hwang's captivating new play, "Yellow Face," which had its world premiere Sunday at the Mark Taper Forum, re-imagines a series of flashpoint incidents from the playwright's past concerning matters of race, identity and, that most puzzling of all concepts, authenticity. It's a low-boil farce masquerading as a documentary (complete with an announcer played by Tony Torn) in which fact and fantasy mix and mingle like nobody's business.

In an age when narratives are doctored for dubious purposes (selling memoirs is the least of it), we've become increasingly anxious about the blurring of fiction and nonfiction. But we shouldn't forget that, in the hands of an artist like Hwang, creative fibbing can lead to the kind of revelation straightforward autobiography just can't scratch.

Too bad the production, directed by Leigh Silverman, isn't as buoyant as the writing. The flat-footed staging, marked by caricatured acting and sluggish timing, lacks the required comic ping. But don't let that put you off from seeing a play that's Hwang's most intellectually resonant since his Tony-winning "M. Butterfly."

"Yellow Face" harks back to an earlier Hwang work you probably haven't heard much about: "Face Value," a play that was written in response to the controversy surrounding "Miss Saigon," the West End musical featuring Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian pimp. When it was announced that "Miss Saigon" was coming to Broadway in 1991 with Pryce as the star, Hwang was one of the leaders in the protest against the casting of a white actor in a role of color. A fracas ensued on the Great White Way when union officials at Actors' Equity initially barred Pryce from acting in the production, then reversed its decision after producer Cameron Mackintosh said he was canceling the show. Pryce went on to win the Tony for his performance, and Hwang gave vent to his feeling in a play that notoriously closed in previews on Broadway in 1993.

Given the poor showing "Face Value" had, you would think Hwang would want to leave this chapter of his career behind him. But "Yellow Face" contrives a new backstage scenario for his old flop in which Hwang inadvertently casts a non-Asian actor for a principal Asian role in the play. Marcus (Peter Scanavino) is brought in after receiving good reviews for an "Asian" production on the West Coast. He looks Caucasian but, hungry for work, is intentionally vague about his background.

DHH (Hoon Lee), the playwright's surrogate, wants the producers to hire Marcus after being impressed by his audition. So what if the part requires an Asian to don whiteface during the protest scene against "Miss Saigon"? In a pointed instance of self-irony, DHH lambastes his producer for saying that Marcus doesn't have Asian features and might confuse audiences when he takes off his whiteface makeup and still looks white. "Asian faces come in a variety of shapes and sizes -- just like any other human beings," he says, before being hoisted on his own petard of political correctness.

When DHH discovers that Marcus really doesn't have a drop of Asian blood, he panics and tries to pass him off as a "Russian Siberian Asian Jew" to a bunch of activist students at the Asian American Resource Center in Boston, where the play is in tryouts.

It's a funny scene, even if it's staged with not much more subtlety than a community theater revue skit, a problem that hampers much of the work's topsy-turvy comedy.

Eventually DHH has the producers fire Marcus, which isn't such a tragedy given the show's ultimate fate. And don't underestimate the ever-resourceful Marcus, who's able to parlay his stint in a DHH play into a flourishing career as an Asian theater star. Not only does he triumph in "The King and I," but he even starts dating DHH's ex-girlfriend, actress Leah (Julienne Hanzelka Kim), a development that only exacerbates the playwright's resentment.

As DHH sees it, Marcus is an "ethnic tourist" and opportunist, yet when the U.S. government begins harassing people of Asian descent (everything from the investigations into whether the Chinese were funneling money to the Democratic Party to the arrest of nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee), it's Marcus who leads the civil rights charge and eventually travels to China in search of some lost connection he hauntingly feels in the music of the Dong people.

"Yellow Face" has fun tracking the slipperiness of racial identity. What does it mean to be a member of an ethnic community? Who can claim to be oppressed? Is our public identity merely a mask? And if so, where does our true nature lie?

These questions have been of enduring dramatic interest to Hwang, and "Yellow Face" finds him in fine contemplative form. There may seem something self-indulgent about a play in which the playwright has a central role. And some may look askance at the way Hwang brings in the story of his late father, Henry Y. Hwang, a prominent California banker who was embroiled in a front-page New York Times scandal involving money laundering for the Chinese government. (Tzi Ma plays both HYH and Wen Ho Lee, and "Yellow Face" draws parallels between their situations.)

But Hwang's tale, though undeniably personal, goes beyond his own narcissistic interests. He's trying to understand the crazy contradictions of being a minority in ceaselessly striving America. And his emotional investment in the subject and his ability, as a dramatist, to imagine the situation from multiple perspectives lends his discussion a felt wisdom that's a refreshing change from the shallow polemics we're too often bombarded with.

The play earns its stage time, even if Silverman has only so-so results with her actors, many of whom have the tricky task of playing multiple characters. Ma finds HYH's obsessive paternal voice and Kim captures Leah's edginess as the ex-girlfriend, but they become exceedingly broad in their sketchier roles.

Lee's DHH makes an attractive stand-in for the author, though he doesn't quite possess Hwang's artsy flair. As Marcus, Scanavino has ample boyish charm, yet his youthful exuberance sometimes gets the better of him, as witnessed by his tendency to flare into boisterous outbursts.

On a spare set marked by a large mirror in which the audience can see a hazy reflection of itself, the actors are given chairs to occupy when they're not directly involved in a scene. This is a common enough practice, though for some reason the actors look like souls in limbo whenever they sit down. Silverman, who directed Lisa Kron's "Well" on Broadway, hasn't created a theatrical universe the cast can be confident in.

Hwang's play deserves better. It may not have many answers to offer, but the questions it puts forth about who we are as a people cut to the heart of America's promise.

GO YELLOW FACE The central character in David Henry Hwang's new farce is David Henry Hwang (played by Hoon Lee) facing an identity crisis after presiding over a casting blunder in his 1993 drama, Face Value. In that debacle, Hwang's character advocates for a Caucasian-appearing actor to play the Asian-American leading role in the play's Boston tryout - on the grounds that the actor has Chinese ancestry. (All of this comes on the heels of Hwang's very loud protests against British producer Cameron Mackintosh using Caucasian star Jonathan Pryce in a Eurasian role in Miss Saigon's Broadway debut.) To avoid appearing as a hypocrite, Hwang's double trumpets his young star's Asian credentials, which turn out to be nonexistent. However, the fabrication gives the young man (played here by Peter Scanavino) both a community he loves and a larger sense of purpose. This is a blazingly candid and almost self-deprecating work in which Hwang's portrait of himself underscores his personal contradictions, his professional failures and a moral core that melts in the heat of ambition. That portrait is also carved by this country, which has historically demonized Asians, and continues to do so. This too is on the stage, and helps explain Hwang's self-depicted desperation to save his skin. Yet that very urgency undercuts the authority, if not the integrity, of his evolving views on identity politics. For this reason, Yellow Face is actually not about identity politics at all, but about narcissism, about the flower that grows by the riverbank and leans toward the water to gaze upon its own reflection. As such, it's a beautiful and truthful slice of theatrical philosophy about illusion and delusion in the form of a personal documentary. It's directed both gently and obviously by Leigh Silverman. But like Hwang's actor in Face Value, this play is quite different from what it claims to be.

May 24, 2007 (Blogcritics.org) -- One of the most satisfying scenes in David Henry Hwang's new Yellow Face, a play full of satisfying scenes, is the face-off between a playwright named David Henry Hwang and an unnamed New York Times reporter. The playwright has taken the unusual step of making himself the protagonist in this cracked-lens look at identity, cultural loyalties, and the relative reliability of commercial theater vs. commercial journalism. The meeting between the writers ends after each gets his an exposé of Hwang's father for the two-faced journalist, and a final chapter for Hwang in the saga that will become Yellow Face (continuing its world premiere through July 1 at the Mark Taper Forum, in a co-production by L.A.'s Center Theatre Group and New York's Public Theater in association with L.A.'s East West Players).

To both ape and undercut the media's claim of objectivity, Yellow Face employs the scattershot quoting of headlines, bylines, and datelines to identify its events and characters. Rather than reflecting on history -- as set designer David Korin's wood deck and massive gold-framed mirror suggest -- Hwang at first seems to be transcribing it. The more these citations punctuate the script, however, the more holes they produce in it. Soon, we are in a limbo where fact and fantasy, whether on stage or front page, are indistinguishable. As Hwang told Sylvie Drake in LA Stage, "Some of the stuff in the play is true and some of it isn't and I hope it's hard to tell the difference."

The seesawing between drama and documentary serves Hwang's larger goal of revealing the cost of prejudice in real terms while showing its utter absurdity through farce. He does this through his own powerful writing and the strong yet playful direction of Leigh Silverman. Silverman holds the tonal teeter-totter for her Asian and Caucasian cast, who balance their alternately scary or silly performances upon it. Future productions of this play, however, will only be this good if they can rest on the kind of sharp-yet-solid fulcrum provided by Hoon Lee.s performance as Hwang. In one of the region.s best stage performances so far this year, Lee makes simultaneously getting the laughs and landing the punches look easy.
Ironically, Hwang credits stories in The New York Times with inspiring his M. Butterfly, the take on the Puccini opera that became a landmark Broadway hit in 1988 and made the 31-year-old the first Asian American playwright to win a Tony for Best Play. Whatever political capital came with his success was immediately tested when mega-producer Cameron Macintosh announced that Miss Saigon, which had opened its record-breaking London premiere in 1989, was heading to Broadway.

Lead Broadway roles for Asian Americans was a dream come true for the underappreciated theater community that Hwang found himself providing a public face. When Macintosh announced that he would bring his London stars, including Caucasian Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian "Engineer," to America, there were protests. The producer justified it by saying he could not find an Asian American good enough for the role. That just compounded the indignity, much like Attorney General Gonzalez did this year in attempting to soothe the feelings of fired U.S. attorneys by attributing his actions to their poor performance.

It was just the latest in a long list of show-business slights for Asian Americans. And in his newfound prominence, Hwang was faced with a lose-lose decision. He could be loyal to the commercial theater that had helped make him a star, or be an advocate for the community that had helped make him a man. What transpired is both reported and satirized in Yellow Face, which incorporates Face Value, Hwang.s failed mid-.90s spoof of these issues. As Spike Lee did with the hypocrisy of blackface in Bamboozled, Face Value did with yellowface, a performance style in which Caucasian actors tinted their skin and pulled their eyelids to evoke an Asian look. As bizarre as it sounds now, stars as big as Marlon Brando, Katherine Hepburn, and Mickey Rooney joined the ruse.

Like Bamboozled, Face Value could not work its brilliant satire into sustainable drama, and famously closed its Broadway run after previews. But, thanks to Yellow Face, it is now part of this hysterical history lesson. (Hwang, who would also protest the depiction of the woman in Miss Saigon, gave a lecture in 1994, which provides additional context.)

Among the stand-outs in the cast are Tzi Ma in numerous roles including Hwang's father, and Peter Scanavino, as the white man who becomes a leading Asian personality based on some resumé tinkering. (By putting him in The King and I, Hwang reminds us of Lou Diamond Phillips, who starred in a recent tour of that warhorse after gaining fame in La Bamba, directed by the same Luis Valdez who had his own casting nightmare with a Frida Kahlo biopic.) Others who give multiple dimensions to multiple personalities are Julienne Hanzelka Kim, Lucas Caleb Rooney, Tony Torn, and Kathryn A. Layng, the real-life wife of the playwright who, despite Yellow Face's careful blurring, knows exactly where the newspaper ends and the fish-wrapper begins.

This world premiere is a co-production between Center Theatre Group in L.A. and The Public Theater in Manhattan. At press time, the Public's press office confirmed that the play would be produced in its 2007-08 Season, but the exact slot was yet to be announced. The production is also made in association with East West Players, which America's paper of record called "the nation's pre-eminent Asian American theater troupe." There will not be a separate run at East West -- whose main stage is named for this playwright, and whose health is in part owed to his father. So that 10% of the ticket price will benefit East West, order tickets online and use code 8873. CREDITS by David Henry Hwang, directed by Leigh Silverman, with Julienne Hanzelka Kim, Kathryn A. Layng, Hoon Lee, Tzi Ma, Lucas Caleb Rooney, Peter Scanavino, Tony Torn. David Korins, set; Myung Hee Cho, costumes; Donald Holder, lights; Darron L. West, sound; James T. McDermott/Elizabeth Atkinson, stage management.

David Henry Hwang's "Yellow Face" is that rarity in theater, a pungent play of ideas with a big heart.

Picaresque tale of playwright "DHH" (Hoon Lee) and his decade-long relationship with a white actor passing for Asian 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.

In its examination of "face" in all that concept's meanings, the play is of a piece with Hwang's investigations of race and identity from "FOB" through "M. Butterfly." But the uniquely jocular tone of "Yellow Face" stems from the central Pirandellian conceit that DHH both is and is not playwright Hwang; the events depicted are variously true, inspired by truth or wholly invented. Jovial premise allows Hwang to move his story beyond autobiography's confines and consider ethnic ambivalence on the part of Americans of every color.

Play kicks off with a brisk recap of the 1990 flap over Jonathan Pryce's casting as "Miss Saigon's" Eurasian lead. Hwang won notoriety in joining Actors Equity's effort (ultimately unsuccessful) to block Pryce's "yellow-face" turn, in response penning "Face Value," a farcical take on color-blind casting that closed before its Gotham preem.

That's all on the record. "Yellow Face" starts to spin off into fancy when a series of miscues causes DHH to approve Marcus G. Dahlman (Peter Scanavino) as "Face Value's" Asian leading man sight unseen, only to discover to his horror that he has selected an actor about as Asian as Dustin Hoffman. DHH's face-saving effort to change actor's name to "Marcus Gee" and persuade the media that Gee is actually a Siberian Jew, complete with atlas verifying Siberia's Asian locale, is an act one comic high point.

That jam is averted, but thesp's subsequent star turn in "The King and I," which makes him the premier Asian American leading man, sends DHH ballistic and determined to force Gee to reveal his real face to the public.

Introduced early is a parallel plot concerning Hwang's father, the first Asian-American owner of a federally chartered bank. As he's known in the play, old-world dad HYH (Tzi Ma) genially cuts through his son's assumptions: He adores "Miss Saigon," for instance, as a beautiful expression of why people want to settle in America. And he has no problem with Marcus' impersonation, since as a Shanghai youth HYH saw himself in celebrity terms: "Who cares? Maybe, in my heart, if I can be Gary Cooper or Clark Gable, then maybe --- in his? --- he can be Marcus Gee."

But the real Henry Y. Hwang was accused of improprieties in connection with John Huang's alleged Clinton administration influence peddling, a fact the playwright uses, along with the contemporaneous espionage charges against physicist Wen Ho Lee, to cast his net wider to consider the sometimes sinister cast of majority attitudes toward Asian Americans.

As these themes all vie for attention, the play starts to feel somewhat out of control, reinforced by the messiness in helmer Leigh Silverman's shuffling of a set of chairs. Cast tends to remain onstage unless they're executing a costume change, sometimes in character and sometimes not, and the physical staging is not always pleasing or expressive.

But Silverman elicits full-out performances of each storyline and character, starting with the remarkable Hoon Lee, equally at home with DHH's comic bafflement and intensity in the face of injustice. Kathryn A. Layng evokes the essence of celebs like Colleen Dewhurst and Jane Krakowski as readily as she embodies Marcus' trailer park mom. A creepily unctuous Tony Torn personifies one of Hwang's favorite targets, the so-called objective journalist with a clear and present agenda. And aud favorite Tzi Ma hilariously delivers HYH's crisp home truths, later prompting tears as the exhausted, debilitated Wen Ho Lee, ending his FBI grilling with thanks to his interrogators.

Despite its ambitious scope, the play retains unity through DDH's central journey from his initial stubborn convictions about race to a greater openness. By no means does he ever have all the answers.

"Maybe," DHH muses, "we should take words like 'Asian' and 'American,' like 'race' and 'nation' --- mess them up so bad no one has any idea what they even mean any more." He says he can imagine such a place in his play at least, and the final image of "Yellow Face" permits us, just for a moment, to envision it. The final Taper attraction prior to a year-long renovation effort, the production will transfer to the co-producing partner the Public Theater in Gotham later this year.

Written by Purple Tigress
Published May 30, 2007
Part of Breaking Legs in Lalaland

You've heard of whiteface, redface, and blackface, but you might not have heard of yellowface. David Henry Hwang's new play, Yellow Face, will change all that.

While whiteface and redface refer to animal species – or, in the case of red-faced, a visage flushed with embarrassment – blackface refers to actors painting their faces black and portraying stereotyped characters from minstrel shows. Likewise, yellowface refers to actors, usually of European descent, made up to be East Asian. Yellow Face, which is a co-production of Center Theatre Group and the Public Theater of New York in association with East West Players, will open in New York this autumn and already opened for previews on May 10 at the Mark Taper Forum.

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