Yellow Face Broadway Reviews

I don’t remember feeling the weight of that insight, or for that matter, the levity of the jokes, when I saw the 2007 production. Part of the improvement in this revival is, no doubt, the result of cuts, fine-tuning and rewritten scenes. The elimination of the intermission helps too; the two halves of the story don’t separate like a sauce. And there’s something to be said for the way a Broadway house, when a solid play is sized up to suit it, responds by giving it space to breathe.

Throughout “Yellow Face,” Silverman uses her talented cast to play all sorts of characters, and the nontraditional casting often delivers a great deal of laughter. It’s fun to see a female actor of color playing a redneck Senator from the South. When Hwang wants to get serious, however, Silverman doesn’t mess around. She casts an actor who looks male and white in the role of the reporter. Oh, can I write that someone looks white and male? Keller also plays the role without a smidgen of the campy gay face that infects some of the other performances. White straight men have become the go-to villains in the theater. Apparently, some stereotypes remain PC.

We can start by thanking Hwang’s terrific play – cut by a half-hour since its overlong Off Broadway version – and crackerjack direction by Leigh Silverman. Perhaps most of all, the production’s appeal rests with a cast led by an excellent Daniel Dae Kim, the Lost and Avatar: The Last Airbender star making a seamless transition to the Broadway stage.

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.)

This closing cavalcade of gotchas somewhat dilutes the potency of what has gone before. But perhaps the real power Yellow Face proposes is of minority voices not just delivering sober-minded rebuttals to bigotry, but—in occupying spaces like a Broadway theater—offering those rebuttals with irreverent humor and pointed swagger while playing with audiences’ perceptions and expectations as freely as possible.

Seventeen years is an eon in theater time, enough to make some plays feel as dated as fondue and Fawlty Towers, but David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face has aged well. Currently receiving its belated Broadway premiere in a swift, tangy production by Leigh Silverman — who also directed its first New York run in 2007 — the play retains its bite in part because its essential subject, like that of many a good comedy, is human folly. “Are you familiar with the Chinese concept of ‘face’?” asks a character in Hwang’s play — that’s as in “losing face” or “saving face.” Although both the inciting incident and the core conflict of Yellow Face have to do with instances of Asian impersonation by a white actor, there’s a reason Hwang’s title has a space in it. It’s not just about white foolishness — it’s about his own, too.

Perception, and who gets to control it, is at the heart of “Yellow Face,” which previously played off-Broadway’s Public Theater in 2007, also under the direction of Leigh Silverman. Hwang’s interest in setting the record straight can seem like an ego trip, and the staging, though pleasantly efficient, has a somewhat clinical feel. So many headlines appear in projection (designed by Yee Eun Nam) that occasionally the play reads like Hwang’s salvo in an ongoing beef with the New York Times.

Weird as it may sound, “Yellow Face” is a good time in the company of smart, self-aware people, critical thinkers willing to ponder the lessons and the follies of the past.

Hwang has given Yellow Face a minor face lift since the original New York production. It’s good work: Minus its intermission and a few inessential scenes, the play seems tauter and smoother, but not unnaturally so; its wrinkles and laugh lines remain. Kim, whose only previous Broadway experience was a brief stint in the King and I role originated by the non-Asian Yul Brynner, capably holds the show’s center as DHH, with an appealing layer of fluster behind his veneer of success. Three versatile actors—Marinda Anderson, Shannon Tyo and Some Like It Hot’s expert Kevin Del Aguila—fill out the many minor roles, often playing against ethnic type; these include quick, insider-y sketches of real-life journalists, activists, theater creators and (such as BD Wong, Margaret Cho and Jane Krakowski).

The semi-autobiographical Yellow Face might have stuffiness in its smart script, but Leigh Silverman’s Broadway staging unearths thoughtful questions about casting politics and Chinese American identity.

The audience at the Todd Haimes Theatre, where Yellow Face has just opened in a lively revival, laughs heartily. Partly because DHH, played by Daniel Dae Kim—of TV’s Lost and Hawaii Five-0—has a wicked way with a one-liner. Also because Hwang is so proudly flaunting his dramaturgical transgression. But mostly because we have been laughing at DHH for the last 90 minutes. Not many writers would be willing to be the butt of so many jokes.

Smiles and laughs it elicits, true enough, because Hwang writes it as an autobiographical comedy-drama. Wittily, he puts himself, DHH—as impersonated by square-jawed Daniel Dae Kim in a crackerjack performance—at its center. In large part, he insists that in many of the ensuing mishaps the joke’s on him. Smart fellow, this on-stage (and, of course, off-stage) Hwang. He recognizes that a man who can make fun of himself will in turn have audiences laughing simultaneously at and with him.

No, there is no direct connection. Yes, “Yellow Face” is specific to the Asian-American experience, and much of it (the first two-thirds) happens just within the theater world. But the misunderstanding, hate, fear, suspicion, and outrage surrounding issues of identity seem to have taken center stage in this country. This might well make audiences find new relevance in Hwang’s comedy, which is opening tonight at Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theater. Mixing fact with fantasy, “Yellow Face” is as thoughtful as it is playful, not the self-indulgent autobiography that “DHH” himself calls it in the play itself – one of its many mischievous meta-theatrical touches.