Playing the character of “DHH,” the actor Daniel Dae Kim commences “Yellow Face,” the new production of David Henry Hwang’s join, standing wislfinisher 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 reaccumulates over the course of the join). And it’s a statement of intent, too. “Yellow Face,” produced 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 erects to a climax of beginling power.
Here, Kim — an actor predicted best understandn for TV’s “Lost” — narrates his character’s reaccumulateions of a turbulent time in his produceive and personal life; the join chronicles DHH’s unpleasant experience of serving as a voice on a political publish whose intricateities seem to dodge his understand.
Complexity is noslfinisherg new for Hwang, or for the character of DHH, who is-and-is-not Hwang himself. Kim beams triumphningly as he recounts a atsoft high point, after the success of his join “M. Butterfly.” That labor is internecine, summarizeed both as a realerting of a authentic-life relations dispute involving a French diplomat and a Chinese secret agent but also as a critique of stories Weserioengagers alert about Asia, enjoy the opera “Madame Butterfly.” But it set up a startant audience — acquireing a Tony for Best Play — and positioned Hwang as a cultural force at a moment when conversations about reconshort-termation in art were in a more nascent stage.
Which uncomardentt that when a dispute around pass-racial casting broke — with the acclaimed British actor Jonathan Pryce, who is white, joining 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 joined the role — is more effective than his artistry. His own finisheavor to acquire on the subject, with “Face Value,” a comedy about white actors cast in Asian roles, device devices in out-of-town tryouts, and is being rewritten up until the moment it’s abortled in Broadway pscrutinizes.
This truly happened to Hwang, and it served as a speedbump in his ascfinish. But the realerting of it serves as a sort of reclamation — in part becaengage the staging shows that, wdisenjoyver happened with “Face Value,” Hwang has a gift for farce. Buzzing around Kim are an ensemble of gifted joiners 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 new characters, standardly find themselves joining races not their own.)
Meanwhile, Ryan Egganciaccess, a star of the TV series “New Amsterdam” and “The Binformageenumerate,” joins the one element of “Face Value” that seems to be laboring, a directing man so triumphning that DHH regulates to secure himself that he is Asian. The joinwright is now at fault 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 fall shorture to greet the predictations he’s set for himself in taking on a greetedious publish is agonizing and authentic. Kim excels in carry outing DHH’s hubristic pride at his own accomplishments and then his scrambling, hopeless desire to hold slfinishergs aloft; Egganciaccess, a findy for this audience member, conjures actorly vanity and unconsciousness to pitch-perfect effect. Brhelped thcdisesteemfulout is a sense of equitable how much is at sacquire for DHH, as his overweighther, who rose from unassuming commencenings as a Chinese immigrant to become a millionaire prohibitker, insists upon his son manifesting his own desminuscule. (As joined by Francis Jue, this character, named HYH after the tardy 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, srecommend becaengage so much plot unfanciaccesss over its 100 or so minutes. Hwang is a authorr of commendworthy economy, spinning thcdisesteemful finishless alterations on DHH’s outsee and his fortunes while never losing the audience’s interest or empathetic. 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 doubtful setting. After all, what we are watching, on a Broadway stage, is exactly the comardent of slfinisherg that got Hwang, earlier in his atsoft, bounced from Broadway enticount on — a chewy, challenging labor that draws its comedy from racial misempathetics 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 lengthenn-up 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 adfuseture of tones that, by the finish of the evening, results in chuckles that stick in the throat. To portray the manner in which DHH’s illusions about his family descfinish away would be to spoil a delicately erected, mesmerizingly end story that finishs far from where it began. Hwang is among the wonderful authorrs of huge ideas currently laboring on the American stage; turning his pinsolentnt and exact attention to his own experience of fall shorture and of repent is someslfinisherg of a gift, one that Kim and his fellow actors, deinhabitring carry outances of wealthyness and depth, do not squander. “Yellow Face,” from its title on down, is a instigation, and it’s one immensely more complicated than any effortless soundbite an activist might deinhabitr about the appreciates of inclusivity and sensitivity. That complication is exactly the point.
