“I’m always thinking about, ‘why are we doing this play now?’,” actor Michael Hisamoto told the Sampan of the Lyric Stage production of “Yellow Face.”
Hisamoto has a key role in the play, written by David Henry Hwang. The semi-autobiographical show is about the playwright, who appears in the play and is the narrator. It’s about Hwang’s life, his father, and the period of the 1990s and the 2000s. It covers big themes like the “yellow peril” and the Asian scares, even campaign finance scandals.
“He is trying to tell all that through a vessel, a character, Marcus G. Dahlman. He is a white person that gets mistaken for Asian, embraces that he is Asian American, and it all becomes a conversation about who gets to decide what your race is, where you belong in the community, and eventually working toward a future in which race really does not matter, in a positive way, and in which people can be who they want to be,” said actor Alexander Holden, who plays Dahlman.