Yellow Face
Opening Night: October 1, 2024
Theater: American Airlines
Website: www.roundabouttheatre.org
Tony Award® winner and three-time Pulitzer finalist David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) will make his Roundabout debut with the Broadway premiere of Yellow Face, his hilarious is-he-or-isn’t-he comedy of identity, show business, and (perhaps) autobiography. Starring Daniel Dae Kim (Lost) and directed by Tony nominee Leigh Silverman (Violet).
Inspired by real events, the playwright’s fictionalized doppelgänger protests yellowface casting in Miss Saigon, only to mistakenly cast a white actor as the Asian lead in his own play. This Obie Award-winning and Pulitzer finalist play is a laugh-out-loud farce about the complexities of race.
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October 1, 2024
I don’t remember feeling the weight of that insight, or for that matter, the levity of the jokes, when I saw the 2007 production. Part of the improvement in this revival is, no doubt, the result of cuts, fine-tuning and rewritten scenes. The elimination of the intermission helps too; the two halves of the story don’t separate like a sauce. And there’s something to be said for the way a Broadway house, when a solid play is sized up to suit it, responds by giving it space to breathe.
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October 2, 2024
The production, as a whole, remains sharp — provocative with its humor, generous with its criticisms and insistent on the disillusionment of the American Dream.
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October 1, 2024
Yellow Face is perhaps less a great work of theater than a great conversation starter. Nevertheless, it’s good to have it back on a New York stage. At the very least, Hwang’s play reminds us how much has changed but also how much remains the same, for all the strides that have been made in Asian representation in the theater world and elsewhere since 2007.
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October 1, 2024
Hwang has given Yellow Face a minor face lift since the original New York production. It’s good work: Minus its intermission and a few inessential scenes, the play seems tauter and smoother, but not unnaturally so; its wrinkles and laugh lines remain.
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October 1, 2024
Seventeen years is an eon in theater time, enough to make some plays feel as dated as fondue and Fawlty Towers, but David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face has aged well. Currently receiving its belated Broadway premiere in a swift, tangy production by Leigh Silverman — who also directed its first New York run in 2007 — the play retains its bite in part because its essential subject, like that of many a good comedy, is human folly.
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October 1, 2024
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 slippery. It resists classification practically to its final moments, even as it builds to a climax of startling power.
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October 1, 2024
With its minimalist sets by David Korins; era-appropriate costumes by Myung Hee Cho; and dreamy lighting (Donald Holder) and sound (Darron L. West) hinting at the time-hopping requirements of a memory play, Silverman’s smoothly directed production is likely the final say on this long-in-coming play and a decades-old theater world brouhaha. David Henry Hwang and Yellow Face get the well-deserved last laughs.
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October 1, 2024
To the credit of director Leigh Silverman and actor Daniel Dae Kim, the first Broadway revival of “Yellow Face,” which opened Tuesday at Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theater, plays much more as a broad farce than it did in its New York City debut in 2007 at the Public Theater.
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October 1, 2024
Hwang’s interest in setting the record straight can seem like an ego trip, and the staging, though pleasantly efficient, has a somewhat clinical feel.
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Kim duly performs a blend of egotistical confidence, comic cowardice, and conscientiousness in the role, and he bounces off an easygoing Ryan Eggold as Marcus, the 100% white guy whom DHH unintentionally grants an Asian American-intended role. Folded within the hilarity are critiques on a system that can enable this snafu.
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The audience at the Todd Haimes Theatre, where Yellow Face has just opened in a lively revival, laughs heartily. Partly because DHH, played by Daniel Dae Kim—of TV’s Lost and Hawaii Five-0—has a wicked way with a one-liner. Also because Hwang is so proudly flaunting his dramaturgical transgression. But mostly because we have been laughing at DHH for the last 90 minutes. Not many writers would be willing to be the butt of so many jokes.
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Smiles and laughs it elicits, true enough, because Hwang writes it as an autobiographical comedy-drama. Wittily, he puts himself, DHH—as impersonated by square-jawed Daniel Dae Kim in a crackerjack performance—at its center. In large part, he insists that in many of the ensuing mishaps the joke’s on him. Smart fellow, this on-stage (and, of course, off-stage) Hwang. He recognizes that a man who can make fun of himself will in turn have audiences laughing simultaneously at and with him.
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