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Review: Yellow Face is a Golden Opportunity for Daniel Dae Kim
October 1, 2024, 11:00.21 pm ET

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Photo: Joan Marcus

By Brian Scott Lipton

In his often-hilarious 2006 play “Yellow Face,” now getting a Broadway revisal at the Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre – yes, there’s been a lot of rewriting of this pointed comedy since it was last seen in New York -- the award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang skewers himself so thoroughly it’s amazing smoke doesn’t emanate the stage.

And while there may be some consolation to Hwang that his semi-fictional alter ego (referred to on the page but not on the stage as DHH) is now being portrayed by the impossibly handsome TV star Daniel Dae Kim – brilliantly showing off some expected dramatic chops along with some unforeseen comic genius -- one still wonders how hard it may be for Hwang to watch (once again) the mistakes, misunderstandings and misery that dominated almost a decade of his life.

For the rest of us, it will be a lot easier, thanks to Leigh Silverman’s snappy production and the stellar work of Kim and five other incredibly gifted actors, including Kevin Del Aguila, Marinda Anderson and Shannon Tyo (each whirling in and out of various roles). Moreover, the piece is all for a good cause by forcing our eyes to clearly focus on the fact that America is a place where racial politics and blind stereotyping causes generally smart people to do and say stupid things, often with wide-ranging unforeseen consequences.

The crux of the play happens years after Hwang (already famous for penning “M. Butterfly”) gained notoriety as the leading Asian voice protesting the casting of the white actor Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian “Engineer” in the Broadway production of the musical “Miss Saigon.” Shockingly, he falls into the same trap by casting a completely, obviously white actor named Marcus (hunky TV star Ryan Eggold in a really fine turn) in an Asian role in the pre-Broadway production of his eventually doomed play “Face Value” (which ultimately closed on Broadway while still in previews.)

Panicked by the thought of public backlash, Hwang forces Marcus to take up the ambiguous stage name of Marcus Gee and makes up some nonsense about him being of Siberian Jewish heritage, which he equates to being Eurasian. While Hwang forces him out of the production during the show’s Boston run, Marcus proves to be both smarter and dumber than he looks. Claiming, perhaps genuinely, to have finally found a sense of community, Marcus continues to not only live the lie but thrive on it -- earning the lead in a national tour of “The King and I” and eventually dating Hwang’s Asian ex-girlfriend -- before admitting the error of his ways.

This comedy of errors earns a lot of laughs, many at Hwang’s expense, so it’s a bit shocking – and arguably disconcerting to some audiences -- when “Yellow Face” takes a sharp dramatic turn for its final third after Hwang’s success-driven Republican father, Henry (a sublime Francis Jue), gets caught up in a major Federal banking scandal, driven by fears of the Chinese interference in American politics.

Moreover, Hwang is more than a bystander: having agreed to sit on the Board of his father’s bank to make some easy money during his fallow years, he also becomes a potential target of the investigation, which he learns during a tense back-and-forth conversation with a savvy, slightly slimy New York Times reporter (an excellent Greg Keller). It’s in this sequence – and the ones which immediately follow – that Kim deftly shows off all the colors of his acting spectrum to spectacular effect.

Not everything in the play or production works perfectly, but “Yellow Face” never whitewashes a very important life lesson: Check your biases and misperceptions every single day before you take any action or open up your mouth.

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