For the Play Yellow Face, Comedy is a Way of Talking About Serious Issues

By Yi Chen

The A.C.T.O.R. (A Continuing Talk on Race) series is a monthly open discussion produced and hosted by Busboys and Poets. The February series featured Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang, who talked about his own experience as an Asian American as well as his play Yellow Face, a comedy about mistaken racial identity.

“I began writing because I wanted to become a playwright, not because I had any particular sense of myself as an Asian American when growing up.” A native of Los Angeles, Hwang is a first generation Chinese American. His father Henry Hwang is a Shanghai immigrant who founded the first federally chartered Chinese American bank, Far East National Bank, in LA Chinatown in 1974.

Few writers have turned issues around ethnicity and identity into a widely acclaimed and award-winning career like David Henry Hwang. His first play FOB depicts the contracts and conflicts between established Asian Americans and “Fresh Off the Boat” newcomer immigrants, which won an Obie Award. FOB, The Dance and the Railroad, and Family Devotions are considered Hwang’s “Trilogy of Chinese America.” Hwang’s second Broadway play Golden Child, a story about an early twentieth-century Chinese family faced with Westernization, received three Tony nominations. M. Butterfly won the 1988 Tony Award for Best Play. The charismatic Hwang is probably the funniest, nicest and humblest person you would ever meet.

 

During the summer of his senior year at Stanford University, Hwang studied with playwrights Sam Shepard, María Irene Fornés and others, who taught him to write from subconscious. “As I began to do that, I found these issues start to appear on the page. Things like immigration, assimilation and clash of cultures. So clearly some part of me was incredibly interested in these issues, but my conscious mind hadn’t figured that out yet.”

“Ever since then, writing has become a way for me to pull the mirror up to my internal self and find out how you really feel about something.” Hwang explained that relationship between him as an artist and his work. “By writing and finding out about myself on the page, I began to understand myself as an Asian American.”

Yellow Face (2007), a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Obie Award winner, is a semi-autobiographical play with the playwright himself as the main character DHH. The play begins with elements of his real life and flawlessly threads fiction with anecdotes that happened to him with humor and wit. “Because of the whole Miss Saigon controversy and I wanted to write about that. I wanted to write a comedy of mistaken racial identity,” Hwang said.

When Miss Saigon opened at the Theatre Royal in London in September 1989, it starred Caucasian Brit Jonathan Pryce as The Engineer, a half Vietnamese pimp and profiteer. Pryce wore eye prostheses and bronzing cream onstage in order to appear Asian, which Hwang called “yellow face” casting. When the show was transferred to New York in 1990, Asian theatre artists protested, including David Henry Hwang.

In 1993 Hwang wrote Face Value in response to the Miss Saigon casting controversy. It was to be the second Broadway production of his work, but closed in previews on March 14, 1993. “But I kept thinking it was a good idea to do a comedy of mistaken racial identity and really question this idea of what it means to play another race. Around 2000, I started thinking about doing it as a stage mockumentary with myself as the main character, which is how it turned out.”

Speaking openly and honestly about issues of race can be tricky, even for an artist. What’s complicated about multiculturalism, Hwang said, is “to be able to laugh at it and also recognize it is important.” Yellow Face is a reflective comedy that is not only enjoyable to watch but also provokes dialogues about the complex and ever-changing role that “face” plays in American life today. Indeed, for the play comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

“I was very interested in the story of a playwright being involved in a public controversy and cultural controversy,” said Ari Roth, Artistic Director at Theater J, which produced the regional premiere of Yellow Face. “The other identification is in the parallel experience between the Asian American and Jewish American immigrant communities.”

For lead actor Stan Kang, the production is “the most amazing experience of my career.” A first generation Korean American, Kang said he felt incredibly lucky and blessed to play the role of DHH. “First of all, I get to play David Henry Hwang and I get to make people laugh. That’s really cool.” The role also allowed him, for the first time, to draw his personal background and experience as an Asian American into a lead role on stage.

David Henry Hwang said he would like to see more diversity in American theater as well as film and television. “Right now, at least in New York, 80% of the roles that are cast in the major theaters are cast with Caucasians and that is just not a very good diversity figure. It means that we are not drawing from the full population and casting the best actor for the part. So I’d like to improve that figure,” he said.

Hwang’s newest play about Bruce Lee Kung Fu has recently opened at Signature Theater in New York City throughout March 30, 2014.

Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang. Directed by Natsu Onoda Power. Featuring Tonya Beckman, Brandon McCoy, Mark Hairston, Stan Kang, Al Twanmo, Rafael Untalan, Jacob Yeh, and Sue Jin Song. Produced by Theater J.

Listen to the full audio interview with David Henry Hwang below: