“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).
In this play 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.”
Perception, and who gets to control it, is at the heart of “Yellow Face,” which previously played off-Broadway’s Public Theater in 2007, also under the direction of Leigh Silverman. 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. So many headlines appear in projection (designed by Yee Eun Nam) that occasionally the play reads like Hwang’s salvo in an ongoing beef with the New York Times.
This closing cavalcade of gotchas somewhat dilutes the potency of what has gone before. But perhaps the real power Yellow Face proposes is of minority voices not just delivering sober-minded rebuttals to bigotry, but—in occupying spaces like a Broadway theater—offering those rebuttals with irreverent humor and pointed swagger while playing with audiences’ perceptions and expectations as freely as possible.
2007 | Off-Broadway |
Original Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
2024 | Broadway |
Roundabout Theatre Company Broadway Premiere Production Broadway |
Videos