You've heard of whiteface, redface, and blackface, but you might not have heard of yellowface. David Henry Hwang's new play, Yellow Face, will change all that.
While whiteface and redface refer to animal species — or, in the case of red-faced, a visage flushed with embarrassment — blackface refers to actors painting their faces black and portraying stereotyped characters from minstrel shows. Likewise, yellowface refers to actors, usually of European descent, made up to be East Asian. Yellow Face, which is a co-production of Center Theatre Group and the Public Theater of New York in association with East West Players, will open in New York this autumn and already opened for previews on May 10 at the Mark Taper Forum.
In 1991, Hwang was one of the Asian-American voices raised against the casting of Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce as the half-Asian engineer in the Madame Butterfly–inspired musical Miss Saigon. Asian-American actors asked, “Why not us?”
In decades past, Asian characters had been portrayed by white actors, notably Marlon Brando in the 1956 film The Teahouse of the August Moon and Peter Sellers in 1980's The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu — but hadn't the time rightfully arrived for Asian characters to be portrayed by Asians?
At the time, Hwang had become the most prominent Asian-American playwright, having won a Tony Award for Best Play for 1988's M. Butterfly, which re-examined Giacomo Puccini's opera with a critical eye. This was before M. Butterfly became a 1993 David Cronenberg movie that was, says Hwang, more about how “all romantic love is self-delusion” than his intended theme of “self-delusion in the context of cultural differences.”
For those unfamiliar with M. Butterfly, Hwang based the play on a titillating tidbit that seemed too outlandish to be true: A French diplomat had carried on a decade-long affair with a Chinese opera star without realizing that the actor was a female impersonator (originally, the Peking Opera had only male actors). By subverting the tale of the East Asian woman used as a pleasant diversion and then left behind, Hwang's play raised issues of Western paternalism and fantasy similar to those raised in the late author Edward Said's work on Orientalism.
In contrast, Miss Saigon seemed not only to raise and praise the submissive East Asian woman myth, but also, by casting a white actor as a half-Asian character, seemed an affront to the slow progress that Asian-Americans actors were making on stage and screen. Despite the protest and the opposition of the first Asian-American playwright to win a Tony, Pryce went on to play the part — and won a Tony for it.
Even though Hwang had written his first off-Broadway play, F.O.B., in his early 20s, he never expected M. Butterfly to become a Broadway hit. In fact, he says, the actors had a betting pool on when the production would fold.
He followed that success with Golden Child, which — after its 1996 world premiere at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa — also went to Broadway and was nominated for a Tony. Since then, Hwang has been busy. He co-wrote (with Linda Woolverton and Robert Falls) the book for the Disney-produced Elton John–Tim Rice musical Aida, worked on Disney's Tarzan and wrote some screenplays. Working on such non-Asian-related works was strangely relaxing since he didn't have the additional level of responsibility of representing Asians and Asian Americans. It was also a measure of his success — proof that he wasn't boxed into an ethnic niche.
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