Playing the character of “DHH,” the actor Daniel Dae Kim begins “Yellow Face,” the new production of David Henry Hwang’s play, standing within a box, from which he promptly strides out.
It’s a crisp and clear visual metaphor in a production hardly short on them (the two onstage boxes rotate to conjure the various locations DHH recollects over the course of the play). And it’s a statement of intent, too. “Yellow Face,” produced on Broadway for the first time after an initial Off Broadway run in 2007, might be the prolific Hwang’s magnum opus, but it’s also wily, wry, and slippery. It resists classification practically to its final moments, even as it builds to a climax of startling power.
Here, Kim — an actor likely best known for TV’s “Lost” — narrates his character’s recollections of a turbulent time in his artistic and personal life; the play chronicles DHH’s unpleasant experience of serving as a voice on a political issue whose complexities seem to evade his grasp.
Complexity is nothing new for Hwang, or for the character of DHH, who is-and-is-not Hwang himself. Kim beams winningly as he recounts a career high point, after the success of his play “M. Butterfly.” That work is internecine, designed both as a retelling of a real-life sex scandal involving a French diplomat and a Chinese spy but also as a critique of stories Westerners tell about Asia, like the opera “Madame Butterfly.” But it found a major audience — earning a Tony for Best Play — and positioned Hwang as a cultural force at a moment when conversations about representation in art were in a more nascent stage.
Which meant that when a scandal around cross-racial casting broke — with the acclaimed British actor Jonathan Pryce, who is white, playing an Asian character in the “Madame Butterfly” adaptation “Miss Saigon” first in London and then in New York — DHH was a natural choice to weigh in. His activism — winning some concessions from the “Miss Saigon” production, though Pryce still played the role — is more effective than his artistry. His own attempt to take on the subject, with “Face Value,” a comedy about white actors cast in Asian roles, bombs in out-of-town tryouts, and is being rewritten up until the moment it’s cancelled in Broadway previews.
This truly happened to Hwang, and it served as a speedbump in his rise. But the retelling of it serves as a sort of reclamation — in part because the staging indicates that, whatever happened with “Face Value,” Hwang has a gift for farce. Buzzing around Kim are an ensemble of gifted players who dip into and out of roles in DHH’s orbit; names from Lily Tomlin to Jane Krakowski to Margaret Cho pepper the script. (And, intriguingly, the troupe of actors, bopping into and out of new characters, often find themselves playing races not their own.)
Meanwhile, Ryan Eggold, a star of the TV series “New Amsterdam” and “The Blacklist,” plays the one element of “Face Value” that seems to be working, a leading man so winning that DHH manages to convince himself that he is Asian. The playwright is now guilty of the very sin he’d critiqued — casting a white actor in an Asian role — and it happened so easily.
The particulars, here, are fictionalized, but the sense we get of DHH’s failure to meet the expectations he’s set for himself in taking on a contentious issue is painful and real. Kim excels in performing DHH’s hubristic pride at his own accomplishments and then his scrambling, desperate desire to keep things aloft; Eggold, a discovery for this audience member, conjures actorly vanity and obliviousness to pitch-perfect effect. Braided throughout is a sense of just how much is at stake for DHH, as his father, who rose from modest beginnings as a Chinese immigrant to become a millionaire banker, insists upon his son manifesting his own destiny. (As played by Francis Jue, this character, named HYH after the late Henry Y. Hwang, is a comic jolt, all aphorisms about the greatness of America and his own unrelenting self-belief.)
It’s hard to write about this show, perhaps, without lapsing into long stretches of summarization, simply because so much plot unfolds over its 100 or so minutes. Hwang is a writer of admirable economy, spinning through endless alterations on DHH’s outlook and his fortunes while never losing the audience’s interest or understanding. Director Leigh Silverman — who worked on the first New York production of “Yellow Face” as well as on productions of several other Hwang works — deserves mention, too, for marshaling an unruly work to fit in an unlikely setting. After all, what we are watching, on a Broadway stage, is precisely the kind of thing that got Hwang, earlier in his career, bounced from Broadway entirely — a chewy, challenging work that draws its comedy from racial misunderstandings and from shrewd dissection of ways in which we are all, at times, blind. By the time he wrote “Yellow Face,” of course, Hwang was a more mature writer than he’d been at the moment of “Face Value.” But fitting this work onto a stage as big as this is Silverman’s accomplishment, too.
So too is the complex admixture of tones that, by the end of the evening, results in laughs that stick in the throat. To describe the manner in which DHH’s illusions about his family fall away would be to spoil a delicately constructed, mesmerizingly complete story that ends far from where it began. Hwang is among the great writers of big ideas currently working on the American stage; turning his careful and precise attention to his own experience of failure and of regret is something of a gift, one that Kim and his fellow actors, delivering performances of richness and depth, do not squander. “Yellow Face,” from its title on down, is a provocation, and it’s one vastly more complicated than any easy soundbite an activist might deliver about the values of inclusivity and sensitivity. That complication is precisely the point.
