An Asian-American playwright and activist gets tangled in a complicated and humorous web of lies as he struggles to win back his integrity.
Lyric Stage Boston closes out the 2024/25 season with David Henry Hwang's semi-autobiographical satirical comedy, Yellow Face.
Truth and fiction blur in David Henry Hwang's satiric memoir about DHH, a playwright plunged into a whirlpool of missteps and unintentional hypocrisy after a vocal protest against the casting of Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian hustler in the Broadway production of Miss Saigon. What he condemns as “yellowface” soon comes back to haunt him when he later misidentifies a Caucasian actor for mixed-race and casts him in his own Broadway-bound comedy. His personal integrity is compromised as he proceeds to conceal his blunder aiding the narrative of this “born-again Asian.”. Ultimately a forceful argument for representation, this provocative and comical sideways glance at race and assimilation asks “who has the ownership of a culture?”