About
the Play:
Finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize
for Drama and Winner of the 2008 OBIE Award
Yellow Face is a
full-length drama by David Henry Hwang.
Truth and fiction blur in Pulitzer Prize finalist David
Henry Hwang's hilarious and
moving show,
which is based on the author's own life. When Hwang unwittingly casts
a white actor as the Asian lead, he quickly gets in over his head. As
the situation spirals further out of control, he finds himself at the
center of a government intrigue and investigation. Yellow Face is a probing,
political satire on racial identity and multiculturalism, by one of
America's leading playwrights.
Yellow Face is a
full-throttle comic attack on bigotry and the American theater. The
lines between truth and fiction blur with hilarious and moving
results in David Henry Hwang's
semi-autobiographical memoir. Asian-American playwright DHH (who
shares the author's initials and profession), fresh off his Tony
Award win for M. Butterfly, leads a protest against the casting of
Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian pimp in the original Broadway
production of Miss Saigon, condemning the practice as "yellowface."
His position soon comes back to haunt him when he mistakes a
Caucasian actor, Marcus G. Dahlman, for mixed-race, and casts him in
the lead Asian role of his own Broadway-bound comedy, Face Value.
When DHH discovers the truth of Marcus' ethnicity, he tries to
conceal his blunder to protect his reputation as an Asian-American
role model, by passing the actor off as a "Siberian Jew."
Meanwhile, DHH's father, Henry Y. Hwang, an immigrant who loves the
American Dream and Frank Sinatra, finds himself ensnared in the same
web of late-1990's anti-Chinese paranoia that also leads to the
"Donorgate" scandal and the arrest of Los Alamos nuclear
scientist Wen Ho Lee. As he clings to his old multicultural rhetoric,
this new racist witch hunt forces DHH to confront the complex and
ever-changing role that "face" plays in American life
today.
Yellow Face premiered in
2007 at Los Angeles' Mark
Taper Forum and then opened
at New York's Public
Theater. David
Henry Hwang won his third Obie
Award in Playwriting and he was a third-time finalist for the
Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Cast: 2 female, 5 male
What people say:
"Yellow Face is
that rarity in theater, a pungent play of ideas with a big heart.
Picaresque tale 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."
— Variety
"The most invigorating
American play I've encountered in many a month. Easily his finest
play since M. Butterfly. The beauty of Yellow Face
is anything but skin deep." — The Guardian
(London)
"One of the Year's Ten Best.
This farcical faux documentary investigates racial and cultural
authenticity in a play that knows when irony must give way to
sincerity, and vice versa." — Los Angeles Times
"Fabulously inventive. Hwang
offers hard-won lessons about leading a public life with personal
integrity." — The New Yorker
"Smart and delightful. A
Chinese box of deceptive amusements and crushing beauty." —
New York Newsday
" Yellow Face
triumphs as a laugh-out-loud comedy, and an unexpectedly poignant
odyssey of self-discovery." — New York Sun
"Charming, touching and
cunningly organized as well as funny. A mordant, reflective comedy
that works not only as a personal summation but as a pattern for us
all as we pick our cautious way through the thicket of claims and
counterclaims that marks America's transactions with its minorities."
— Village Voice
"Brave and engrossing. Part
autobiography, part documentary, part self-parody, part protest play,
Yellow Face is funny and startling and moving."
— Philadelphia Inquirer
About the Playwright:
David Henry Hwang is a Chinese American playwright,
librettist, and screenwriter, described by The New York Times
as "a true original" and by TIME magazine as
"the first important dramatist of American public life since
Arthur Miller." Throughout his career, he has explored the
complexities of forging Eastern and Western cultures in a
contemporary America. His extraordinary body of work, over the past
30 years, has been marked by a deep desire to reaffirm the common
humanity in all of us. He is best known as the author of M.
Butterfly, which won the 1988 Tony, Drama Desk, John Gassner, and
Outer Critics Circle Awards, and was also a finalist for the 1989
Pulitzer Prize. In 2012, he won the $200,000 US Steinberg
Distinguished Playwright Award, the richest theatre prize in the U.S.