Interview: David Henry Hwang on the Cultural Shifts That Led to Yellow Face to Broadway

In the 1990s, playwright David Henry Hwang famously protested the casting of white British actor Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian pimp called the Engineer in the Broadway premiere of Miss Saigon. After Miss Saigon opened, Hwang — then already a Tony winner for M. Butterfly — responded with a play titled Face Value, a farce about a pair of Asian American actors who intend to protest the Broadway opening of a new musical titled The Real Fu Manchu, which features a white actor in the lead, at the “Imperialist Theatre.”

Face Value lasted a grand total of eight previews on Broadway before closing down. And how did Hwang eventually respond? By writing another play about the experience. That one had better results: Upon its premiere at the Public Theatre in 2007, Yellow Face won an Obie and became a Pulitzer finalist.

In Yellow Face, a playwright named DHH is writing a play called Face Value, loosely inspired by the controversy around Miss Saigon, and inadvertently casts a white actor in one of the lead Asian roles. After DHH realizes the error, he convinces the performer to use a different name and describe himself as having Jewish and Siberian ancestry. Naturally, chaos ensues.

More than a decade after its premiere, the real DHH is revisiting Yellow Face, once again with director Leigh Silverman. Heading the cast as the stage DHH is Daniel Dae Kim, of TV’s Lost, and stage vet Francis Jue, who reprises a performance he originated downtown as DHH’s father, HYH. The canvas is bigger this time: They’re on Broadway at Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre.

Rightfully, the actual DHH is thrilled by the opportunity to revisit the work, and also several others that are popping up at the same time.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Of late, you’ve been revisiting several pieces from different stages of your career: 2003’s Ainadamar for the Metropolitan Opera, 2007’s Yellow Face on Broadway, and 2019’s Soft Power for Signature Theatre in DC. What is that like for you as a writer?
I’ve had this experience before; I’ve had some other works that have been revived. I think what’s different now about Yellow Face is that, for a long time, if you were going to bring a play about Asians to Broadway, it had to be set in Asia. Even among my other Broadway shows, with the exception of Flower Drum Song, which is a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, they were not American stories.

The idea that the culture has shifted enough so that these issues, which were once a little bit more esoteric, are now at the center of our discourse, is very satisfying, and says a lot about how things have changed.

This role in Yellow Face is different for Daniel Dae Kim — I think everyone’s used to seeing him on Lost, a sort of action hero.
The surprise for people is going to be the degree to which Daniel is wonderful at being a comic actor. And there’s an interesting confluence here. In addition to being a great actor, Daniel is known for being an activist and an Asian American role model. These are characteristics that the DHH character has, which the play then attempts to undermine. A lot of the humor comes out of that character trying to hold on to his reputation after having made a huge mistake. To see Daniel, who has that activist persona, struggling with what it means to lose that and cover up his mistake, is pretty fun.

The one cast member who’s returned from the original production is Francis Jue, who is playing HYH, the DHH character’s father.
I’ve known Francis since his first job out of school, which was the original Broadway production of M. Butterfly. He came in as an understudy and went on to do the part in a couple of the national tours. I’ve grown with Francis, and we have grown together as theater artists. At the time that he played HYH in 2007, he was actually rather too young for the part, but he did it so well. Now, he’s the right age, and therefore, he brings this level of maturity and gravitas, which is important to the role. For what it’s worth, he reminds me of my father even more now.

Soft Power is a musical about politics, and the timing now is even more fraught than it was five years ago when it premiered. Did you look at it differently when you and Jeanine Tesori were readying this revised version for Signature?
It is certainly true that the scheduling of the play in Washington before the 2024 election was deliberate on the part of Signature. It was exciting to us. Mostly, Jeanine and I were trying to address things that we felt were still confusing to an audience from the 2019 version. It was interesting, even during the time between going into rehearsal and opening at Signature, the political landscape changed. Biden dropped out and Harris became the [Democratic] nominee [for President]. Audiences, I believe, are experiencing the play differently and more hopefully and exuberantly than they would have even two months ago. It’s fascinating the degree to which the reception of the play is influenced by the political landscape in real life.

Both works have autobiographical elements, with characters called DHH. Do you see a thematic link between the DHH in Yellow Face and the DHH of Soft Power?
I haven’t really thought about a DHH-averse, as it were, and how the two characters relate to each other. They seem to be different manifestations. I do know that when we were working on Soft Power, Jeanine Tesori and Leigh Silverman kept saying to me that I had to take my character more seriously than I do in Yellow Face. So, there’s that distinction. But I don’t know the link between the two versions, except that they’re both theoretically versions of me.

Hopefully, I won’t do it again. I thought after Yellow Face I wasn’t going to. And then, in Soft Power, with the neck stabbing and stuff, I thought I might as well just name him after myself.

There’s a level of discomfort and vulnerability, which I find both disconcerting and exciting. Maybe as where it relates to Asian Americans, we are sometimes raised to be more deferential and self-effacing. Perhaps there is something important about taking up space and asserting your presence, which leads to the DHH character.

And I’ve been somewhat gratified, since the original Yellow Face, that that technique has seemed to become more common, whether in Qui Nguyen’s plays, or in Lauren Yee’s, or even Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s. I hope it means that people saw the show and went, “Oh, that’s not so bad. I can do that.”