OnStage: Mockery is the medium
Playwright David Henry Hwang satirizes himself and cultural identities in "Yellow Face."
By ROHAN PRESTON, Star Tribune
Last update: February 4, 2010 - 10:19 PM
When "Miss Saigon" transferred from London to Broadway in 1991, it was met with protests by Asian-American activists because white actors were playing Asian characters in two of the principal male roles. Eminent playwright David Henry Hwang was among those who objected to the casting of "Saigon."
Now Hwang has crafted a play that deals with some of the questions raised by that episode and also features a character named David Hwang who does things the author decries.
In "Yellow Face," which opens Saturday at the Guthrie Theater in a Mu Performing Arts production, the playwright has written a character who chooses a white man, Marcus, to play an Asian lead in a play called "Face Value."
The character, David, tries to pass Marcus off as Eurasian, albeit a far-fetched one (a Siberian Jew). By the time Marcus' true ancestry becomes clear to all, David and his backers are too deep in the production to turn back. They have spent $2 million on "Face Value" and Marcus, believing that he is actually Asian, has become an impassioned activist for Asian rights, even as others see him as an "ethnic tourist."
"Part of the fun of the play is that it's kind of a mockumentary," Hwang said in an interview last week. While incorporating elements of the "Miss Saigon" controversy, he said, "the play is trying to have fun with the thin line between fiction and imagination. It's partly a struggle between artistic freedom and these pernicious archetypes."
Hwang has been spending a lot of time in the Twin Cities recently. Last year his update of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Flower Drum Song" played the Ordway Center. In April, "M. Butterfly," the play that catapulted him into the canon and won three Tony Awards in 1988, will be produced at the Guthrie. In that work, a French diplomat has a decades-long love affair with a Chinese Opera diva who is actually a male spy.
By dint of his success, Hwang has become a spokesperson, a role that he has been ambivalent about. "Yellow Face" is an expression of that ambivalence, said actor Randy Reyes, who plays David in the comedy.
"He's fierce and intelligent but a really, really honest character," Reyes said. "I don't know if I could be that open about my flaws, about my ego and use of power, but it's a great character to play."
Followup to a flop
For Hwang, the play is only part autobiography. Hwang first tried to deal with the subject of mistaken cultural identities in a play called "Face Value." But that follow-up to "M. Butterfly" was an artistic and commercial flop. (It closed in previews, at a loss of millions.)
But he never let the idea go. So, after being inspired by, among others, Larry David's comedy series "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and Doug Wright's "I Am My Own Wife," Hwang took another stab at the subject with "Yellow Face."
"The term 'yellowface' refers to the casting of a Caucasian actor made to appear Asian, similar to blackface," Hwang said. "There's a long history of those images onstage and onscreen."
The "Miss Saigon" episode was an ideal moment to challenge the practice, he said.
"When something gets elevated to this level of cultural consumption, on Broadway, it gives you an opportunity to broach the conversation," he said. "That it so quickly catches fire in the media is the result of so much pent-up tension in the culture, of everybody feeling they're getting the short end of the stick. White people were feeling like they're being coerced by political correctness. Asians were feeling like they didn't have a voice in the construction of their own images."
Audiences will be surprised that Hwang, the playwright, was conflicted about the "Miss Saigon" protests.
"In this play, I wanted to poke some fun at the excesses of multiculturalism while at the same time recognizing its value," he said. "It's possible to have a sufficiently nuanced view to recognize its value and its excess at the same time."
"Who is an Asian? Do these categories, into which we are born, have essential meanings or the meanings that we assign to them? Is it possible that someone who's not Asian in terms of DNA can be Asian?"
Hwang said that these questions are being dealt with not only in the West, but in Asia. In China, an African-Chinese singer, Lou Jing, has won some singing competitions and caused China to confront identity issues.
"You don't have to look at minorities in a country to see how questions of identity take on weird colors," Hwang said. "The majority of Chinese are Han who trace their lineage to the emperor who built the Great Wall, but he wasn't even Han. If you go to Eastern Europe, Romanians get really mad at you if you call them Slavs. They were conquered by Slavs for 800 years, and by Romans for only 200, but don't tell them that."
That he can poke fun at himself and the whole issue of yellowface is a mark of cultural progress, Hwang said.
"When we get into discussions of race, the tendency is to get defensive," he said. "Everybody runs to preassigned corners and puts up walls. The way to break that down is through humor."
Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390