Yellow Face

Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Firescape Theatre and Yolk Productions at the Beverly Hills Playhouse
Through September 26

In 1989, Caucasian actor Jonathan Pryce, sporting eye prosthetics and bronzer, appeared as a Eurasian pimp in a West End production of playwright David Henry Hwang’s Miss Saigon. Pryce won the Olivier award that year for best actor in a musical, and was slated to appear in the Broadway production as well. But the thought of a white actor playing a half-Asian character infuriated many activists and minority players in the American theater community. A protest was organized, with Hwang drafted to become one of its spokespersons. Actors’ Equity supported the outcry, and Pryce was proscribed from appearing, until producer Cameron Mackintosh threatened to cancel unless he was featured. The union reversed its stance, and Pryce went on to play the role and win the Tony.

This contentious event served as the spark for Hwang’s subsequent play, Face Value, which attempted to explore the conflicts and ironies surrounding the protest debacle. The play, which received withering reviews, crashed and burned after 8 preview performances. Determined to explore the knotty issue of color conscious casting, Hwang then wrote Yellow Face, a witty if sometimes wordy comedy that deals not only with race matters within the entertainment industry, but with race and identity in general and the human penchant to see or believe what suits us rather than what’s objectively before our eyes.

In interviews, Hwang has said that Yellow Face, which takes the form of a wry documentary, is a mix of fact and fiction. The pivotal character, DHH (Jeffrey Sun), is a stand-in for the playwright, and the story begins with a compressed replay of the Pryce incident that incorporates the input of various critics (e.g. Frank Rich) and politicians (Ed Koch). The ongoing controversy takes an odd turn when DHH moves on to cast another of his plays; he and the producers have trouble finding an Asian actor for the lead, in the end choosing a white actor, Marcus (Roman Moretti), by rationalizing that he must have some drop of Asian blood (his Jewish father spent time in Siberia — which is in Asia, after all).

Marcus, for his part, becomes a hit with Asian-American audiences and fans and begins to identify with the community. He travels to China where he becomes enthralled with Dong culture, while here at home he becomes politically active in defending the Chinese American community — unlike DHH, who is ambivalent about investing his time in politics and public appearances.

Eventually Marcus’s career soars, to the point where he gains celebrity as the star of The King and I, coming to the attention even of DHH’s conservative banker father, who praises him as a representative of their community and fails to understand when his son protests that Marcus isn’t Asian at all.

The play gains gravitas in Act 2 with the recounting of the accusations of spying against Chinese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee in the 1990s, and the investigation of DHH’s father, HYH (Alberto Faustino) for money laundering in collusion with Chinese firms (Hwang’s real-life father was indeed investigated for such). An encounter DHH has with a journalist (John Pendergast) looking into the latter story exposes the raw racism that remains a prevailing undercurrent among many white Americans.

Yellow Face packs a lot of ideas and information into its near two-hour running time but there’s little dramatic action. So the onus falls on the actors — most heavily on Sun as DHH — to provide the drama through their reaction to events. Under Robert Zimmerman’s direction, Sun’s laidback performance is serviceable but without the crisp ironical edge to make him interesting. Some of the same can be said of Moretti in the potentially delicious comic role of Marcus, a person who at one point almost forgets that he’s white. Also, Faustino is unconvincing as an elderly Chinese-American financier, and there’s little familial chemistry apparent between his character and Sun’s. Lisagaye Tomlinson does fine in multiple minor roles that are essentially expository, while Jennifer Lo Ve is most memorable as DHH’s sulky supercilious ex, who ends up bedding down with Marcus, much to DHH’s dismay.

With no set to speak of, the production would benefit from an adept lighting design, but there was none at all that I could see, nor anyone credited.

Beverly Hills Playhouse, 254 S. Robertson Blvd., Beverly Hills; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through September 26; (323) 960-7773 or yellowface.eventbrite.com or www.plays411.com/yellowface. Running time: two hours and ten minutes with an intermission.