JOAN MARCUS
The playwright behind Yellow Face did more than just tell a story, he mined his own life for material.
“Laughter,” David Henry Hwang says, “is potentially a binding force in the theater. It allows us to relax around each other and feel more comfortable in the context of issues that sometimes make us squirm.”
What kind of issues might those be? In the case of Yellow Face, Hwang’s Pulitzer Prize-finalist play currently running at Broadway’s Todd Haimes Theatre through November 24, audiences can take their pick. The sharp, funny drama—which the New Yorker called “audacious and fresh”—takes inspiration from Hwang’s own life, beginning with his protests regarding the casting of a white actor to play a Eurasian role in the 1990 Broadway musical Miss Saigon, and tackles additional complications in the form of racial injustice on and off stage, family drama, and professional pitfalls, just to name a few. For anyone who still doesn’t feel just a bit uneasy, remember that the play’s main character (played by Daniel Dae Kim) is a playwright named DHH.
That’s just one place where real life and the world Yellow Face, which is directed by Leigh Silverman,depicts on stage differ. While the Hwang character in the show can come across as occasionally bumbling, in real life the Tony-winning playwright seems to know exactly what he’s doing.
“David really has experienced a lot, and he’s much more willing to put himself and his private life into the public, not only through his work but through his advocacy,” explains Kim. “He has had some interesting things happen to him that have fed his life, not just as a human being but as an artist, and I applaud his bravery in wanting to share that with audiences. It not only makes him an interesting character in life, but also on the page. It’s easy to see why he would want to take his own experiences and shift them only slightly to have them apply to all of us.”