In March, Red Scare Theatre Company will stage the New Zealand premiere of David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face. Cassandra Tse will direct the show, having recently returned from an internship at Signature Theatre in New York City where Hwang is a resident playwright.
When Tse first picked up Yellow Face she “couldn’t believe how funny it was, how intelligent and nuanced its politics were.” Her experience with Asian theatre in New Zealand is that it was usually “very serious, focused almost exclusively on tradition, mythology and ancient culture, and completely unrelatable to someone like me, a fourth-generation Chinese-Pākeha New Zealander who has never been to China.” Yellow Face was as a complete counterpoint for her; its ability to be “contemporary, witty, and not above poking fun at itself” meant that it was vital to bring this work to New Zealand.
Read the whole article at Scoop.