There’s room to speculate that a play addressing the news headlines and Broadway scandals of the Clinton era might feel a little off the boil in terms of topicality. Its issues a little stewed.
Not so Yellow Face. David Henry Hwang’s rueful 2007 comedy runs hot against today’s backdrop of rising sinophobia, assertive expressions of all forms of identity and superpower realpolitik.
Hwang’s play weaves several strands, most of them documentary, some fictional. One draws on Hwang’s leading involvement in the 1990 protests against the “yellow face” casting of British actor Jonathan Pryce in an Asian role in Broadway production of Miss Saigon.