The Best Musical and Best Play Revival contenders, respectively, showcase Asian talent on and off stage and wrestle with Asian theatre's past and its future.
After 78 years of the Tony Awards, Daniel Dae Kim is the first Asian actor to be nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Leading Performance in a Play. Should he win, for playing "DHH" in the fall 2024 revival of David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face, he will only be the 19th person of Asian descent to win a Tony Award in history.
As Hwang expresses in his work (alongside Yellow Face, which premiered off Broadway in 2007, he is also best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning M. Butterfly), the past is never really past. Amid cuts to National Endowment of the Arts grants and diversity programs across industries, the evolving theatre landscape Hwang investigates still suggests progress when it comes to inclusion, even as the terrain threatens to become more unstable.