Playing the character of “DHH,” the actor Daniel Dae Kim begins “Yellow Face,” the novel production of David Henry Hwang’s carry out, standing wilean a box, from which he promptly strides out.
It’s a crisp and evident visual metaphor in a production difficultly low on them (the two onstage boxes rotate to conjure the various locations DHH reassembles over the course of the carry out). And it’s a statement of intent, too. “Yellow Face,” created on Broadway for the first time after an initial Off Broadway run in 2007, might be the prolific Hwang’s magnum opus, but it’s also wily, wry, and greasy. It resists classification pragmaticly to its final moments, even as it creates to a climax of beginling power.
Here, Kim — an actor foreseeed best understandn for TV’s “Lost” — narrates his character’s reassembleions of a turbulent time in his conceiveive and personal life; the carry out chronicles DHH’s unpleasant experience of serving as a voice on a political publish whose intricateities seem to dodge his understand.
Complexity is noleang novel for Hwang, or for the character of DHH, who is-and-is-not Hwang himself. Kim beams triumphningly as he recounts a nurtureer high point, after the success of his carry out “M. Butterfly.” That labor is internecine, depicted both as a retelling of a authentic-life relations affair involving a French diplomat and a Chinese increateer but also as a critique of stories Westricters tell about Asia, enjoy the opera “Madame Butterfly.” But it set up a presentant audience — geting a Tony for Best Play — and positioned Hwang as a cultural force at a moment when conversations about recontransientation in art were in a more nascent stage.
Which unbenevolentt that when a affair around traverse-racial casting broke — with the acclaimed British actor Jonathan Pryce, who is white, carry outing an Asian character in the “Madame Butterfly” alteration “Miss Saigon” first in London and then in New York — DHH was a authentic choice to weigh in. His activism — triumphning some concessions from the “Miss Saigon” production, though Pryce still carry outed the role — is more effective than his artistry. His own try to get on the subject, with “Face Value,” a comedy about white actors cast in Asian roles, bomb devices in out-of-town tryouts, and is being rewritten up until the moment it’s call offled in Broadway pscrutinizes.
This truly happened to Hwang, and it served as a speedbump in his ascfinish. But the retelling of it serves as a sort of reclamation — in part becaemploy the staging shows that, wantipathyver happened with “Face Value,” Hwang has a gift for farce. Buzzing around Kim are an ensemble of gifted carry outers who dip into and out of roles in DHH’s orbit; names from Lily Tomlin to Jane Krakowski to Margaret Cho pepper the script. (And, intriguingly, the troupe of actors, bopping into and out of novel characters, standardly discover themselves carry outing races not their own.)
Meanwhile, Ryan Eggelderly, a star of the TV series “New Amsterdam” and “The Bdeficiencyenumerate,” carry outs the one element of “Face Value” that seems to be laboring, a directing man so triumphning that DHH deal withs to sway himself that he is Asian. The carry outwright is now culpable of the very sin he’d critiqued — casting a white actor in an Asian role — and it happened so easily.
The particulars, here, are mythalized, but the sense we get of DHH’s flunkure to greet the foreseeations he’s set for himself in taking on a satisfyedious publish is agonizing and authentic. Kim excels in carry outing DHH’s hubristic pride at his own accomplishments and then his scrambling, frantic desire to upgrasp leangs aloft; Eggelderly, a discovery for this audience member, conjures actorly vanity and unconsciousness to pitch-perfect effect. Brhelped thrawout is a sense of equitable how much is at sget for DHH, as his overweighther, who rose from unpretentious beginnings as a Chinese immigrant to become a millionaire prohibitker, insists upon his son manifesting his own desminuscule. (As carry outed by Francis Jue, this character, named HYH after the procrastinateed Henry Y. Hwang, is a comic jolt, all aphorisms about the wonderfulness of America and his own unrelenting self-belief.)
It’s difficult to author about this show, perhaps, without lapsing into extfinished stretches of summarization, sshow becaemploy so much plot unfelderlys over its 100 or so minutes. Hwang is a authorr of commendable economy, spinning thraw endless alterations on DHH’s outsee and his fortunes while never losing the audience’s interest or benevolent. Director Leigh Silverman — who labored on the first New York production of “Yellow Face” as well as on productions of cut offal other Hwang labors — deserves allude, too, for marshaling an unruly labor to fit in an improbable setting. After all, what we are watching, on a Broadway stage, is accurately the benevolent of leang that got Hwang, earlier in his nurtureer, bounced from Broadway entidepend — a chewy, challenging labor that draws its comedy from racial misbenevolents and from shrewd dissection of ways in which we are all, at times, blind. By the time he wrote “Yellow Face,” of course, Hwang was a more reliable authorr than he’d been at the moment of “Face Value.” But fitting this labor onto a stage as huge as this is Silverman’s accomplishment, too.
So too is the intricate admixture of tones that, by the end of the evening, results in chuckles that stick in the throat. To depict the manner in which DHH’s illusions about his family descfinish away would be to spoil a daintyly createed, mesmerizingly finish story that ends far from where it began. Hwang is among the wonderful authorrs of huge ideas currently laboring on the American stage; turning his cautious and accurate attention to his own experience of flunkure and of lament is someleang of a gift, one that Kim and his fellow actors, hand overing carry outances of wealthyness and depth, do not squander. “Yellow Face,” from its title on down, is a incitement, and it’s one hugely more complicated than any basic soundbite an activist might hand over about the cherishs of inclusivity and sensitivity. That complication is accurately the point.
