The comedy comes in as he attempts to cover up his mistake.
For those who don't know, Face Value is one of Hwang's notable failures, a play starring Law & Order: SVU's B.D. Wong that went to Broadway in 1993 and closed after previews. Informed that Wikipedia describes Yellow Face as a rewrite of that failed effort, Hwang says, “I don't know if I'd call it a rewrite. That's when you're reworking or you're going back to that play to fix it.”
Hwang hopes that there's been some evolution of his ideas since the early 1990s, but this new play does take on some of the original issues he addressed in Face Value, namely those of cultural identity and “the complexity of authenticity as a concept.”
Authenticity? That's a familiar issue. “Authenticity is an ambiguous term,” he adds, after being asked about writer and activist Frank Chin. Chin, who lives in Los Angeles, has labeled Hwang and other Asian-American writers as “inauthentic.” Hwang quotes Chin in Yellow Face as labeling DHH “a white racist asshole.”
Yet, Hwang states, "I really like him as a writer. I kind of consider him to be my literary father, which then makes me a disowned son. When F.O.B. was first done in New York, I was 23 and I looked on Frank as a pioneer."
Hearing Chin's criticism, Hwang acknowledges, “It hurt my feelings.” But that was more than 20 years ago. While Hwang has “kind of gone back and forth” on his feelings about Chin's criticism, he's glad that now there are a lot more Asian-American playwrights who can represent different points of view. Obviously Yellow Face, with a protagonist named DHH, represents Hwang's own viewpoint.
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