The goal: a comedy about mistaken racial identity inspired by protests over “Miss Saigon.” The result: a backstage farce that never got to opening night.
David Henry Hwang’s “Face Value” arrived on Broadway on March 9, 1993. It left five days later. For Gina Torres, an actress in that production, the news came as a relief. “Because we were pushing that stone uphill for a good long time,” she said.
“Face Value,” Hwang’s follow-up to the Tony Award-winning “M. Butterfly,” was a farce — and not entirely in the ways that Hwang and Jerry Zaks, the play’s director, intended.
In 1990, Hwang, the first Asian-American to win a playwriting Tony, joined members of Actor’s Equity in objecting to the casting of Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian character in the Broadway production of “Miss Saigon.” Equity rejected the casting.