After Jonathan Pryce was announced as the Eurasian lead for the musical Miss Saigon’s 1991 Broadway run, playwright David Henry Hwang—who won a Tony for writing M. Butterfly a few years earlier—made it his cause célèbre to protest the whitening of Asian characters. Hwang lost that battle, for not only did Pryce play the role but won a best actor Tony for his admittedly brilliant performance.

 

That skirmish was the genesis for Yellow Face, Hwang’s lacerating if uneven play recounting his professional and personal fallout. Its first Broadway revival is staged by the always resourceful Leigh Silverman; she also helmed the 2007 premiere at the Public Theater, and she gets more laughs than insights—which is more Hwang’s fault than hers. The story revolves around the casting for Hwang’s follow-up to M. Butterfly, a 1993 play titled Face Value, in which DHH (as he calls his stage alter ego) wants a young actor named Marcus—who’s starring in a play about Asian American soldiers but doesn’t look very Asian—for the lead. DHH convinces the director and producer to cast the supposedly Asian but definitely white Marcus, which begins a chain of events that puts his own liberal bona fides in jeopardy. (That Face Value was a huge bomb when it premiered doesn’t help matters.)

 

Unsurprisingly, Yellow Face is complicated: Hwang laments the lack of Asian representation that’s plagued theater—along with movies and TV—for decades, but his own Marcus problem shows Hwang’s own guilt by association. But, although much of what is shown in Yellow Face really happened, the casting of Marcus is a fiction, a conceit that also calls into question the playwright’s own honesty in his scathing indictment, since one of his biggest mistakes is largely made up. 

 

More successful are the amusing but uneasy scenes between Hwang and his father HYH, a successful West Coast banker and proud immigrant who loves America. HYH (played with nuance and empathy by Francis Jue) has no patience for those criticizing his adopted country: he even sees himself as John Wayne, a winner in the American dream sweepstakes. HYH is also the ever-disappointed father, however famous his son has become—he asks DHH for tickets to see, of all things, Miss Saigon. 

 

Later, a New York Times reporter (the agreeably sleazy Greg Keller) speaks with DHH, who was made a bank board member by his father, that HYH’s using Chinese money to expand his bank operations might entangle DHH himself. (Strangely, the Times reporter’s name is redacted when spoken and shown, a silly conceit because anyone can look up his name on Google.) These scenes about Hwang’s father—personal, angry, sorrowful—far outclass the main plot that gives Yellow Face its name.

 

Despite such imbalances, Yellow Face works handily in Silverman’s sly, dry production. (The witty sets by Arnulfo Maldonado and clever lighting by Lap Chi Chu help give the proceedings a laser focus.) The multicultural supporting cast plays disparate roles—reviewers, actors, activists, producers—that add intriguing and humorous layers on top of what’s in the script. And holding all the strands together as DHH is Daniel Dae Kim, a charismatic and sympathetic stand-in for Hwang.