The Best of All Possible Intentions: Yellow Face and Good Bones

By
Sara Holdren,
a theater director and a critic at New York magazine and Vulture.

From Yellow Face, at the Todd Haimes Theatre.
Photo: Joan Marcus

Seventeen years is an eon in theater time, enough to make some plays feel as dated as fondue and Fawlty Towers, but David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face has aged well. Currently receiving its belated Broadway premiere in a swift, tangy production by Leigh Silverman — who also directed its first New York run in 2007 — the play retains its bite in part because its essential subject, like that of many a good comedy, is human folly. “Are you familiar with the Chinese concept of ‘face’?” asks a character in Hwang’s play — that’s as in “losing face” or “saving face.” Although both the inciting incident and the core conflict of Yellow Face have to do with instances of Asian impersonation by a white actor, there’s a reason Hwang’s title has a space in it. It’s not just about white foolishness — it’s about his own, too.

“It’s a memoir — a kind of unreliable memoir,” Hwang told the Washington Post in 2014. “There are some things in it that are true and there are some things in it that aren’t true.” As in the recent musical Soft Power, Hwang is at the center of his own play, but through a glass comically. His protagonist is a Chinese American playwright called DHH, here given improbable levels of movie-star magnetism by Daniel Dae Kim. That’s part of the joke: Cast someone as smooth and handsome as Kim and then let him bumble things time and again because of his ego. At the same time, Kim stands as proof against the lazy, bigoted argument casting directors make both in Hwang’s play and outside it, especially when it comes to charismatic leading men: “They couldn’t find any Asian qualified to play the part.”

Those are the words that an enraged B. D. Wong (hilariously personified by Kevin Del Aguila, whom I actively missed when he wasn’t onstage) repeats to DHH over the phone as Yellow Face begins. This is one of the parts that’s true. In 1988, a whole storm of shit went down around the casting of Jonathan Pryce as the Engineer, a “Eurasian pimp,” in Miss Saigon. In London, Pryce won an Olivier for his part in the splashy Cameron Mackintosh–produced musical. (And as much as I like Jonathan Pryce, it was a bad move — look at poor 17-year-old Lea Salonga’s face when Pryce demonstrates his eye prosthetics on the BBC.) When a Broadway transfer starring Pryce was announced, protests broke out on this side of the Atlantic, and David Henry Hwang — riding a wave of celebrity after his Tony win for M. Butterfly — played a big part in them.

So did plenty of other people who at this point might prefer to remain anonymous. No such luck here. Some of the spiciest laughs in Yellow Face come from the show’s gleeful parade of real names, all embodied in satirical snippets by Del Aguila and his equally impish ensemble mates Shannon Tyo and Marinda Anderson. Greg Keller makes a wry and eventually sinister straight man out of the Times reporter who leads us through these cameos — his name is “withheld on advice of counsel,” but his sources are on the record. “This is a tempest in an Oriental teapot,” gripes Tyo’s supercilious Cameron Mackintosh. “Jonathan Pryce’s brilliant performance is as essential to Miss Saigon as Joel Grey’s was to Cabaret,” claims Del Aguila’s Frank Rich, then chief Times critic (it’s slightly rephrased, but yes, he wrote it). When Actors’ Equity initially responds to the protests and bans Pryce, as a white actor, from playing the Engineer, Del Aguila gets to turn, for a brief chef’s kiss of a moment, into Ed Koch: “Now it’s Actors’ Equity, playing the censor!” he bellows Bronxily. But Koch needn’t fume for long. Equity quickly caves under pressure from big dogs like Mackintosh and reverses its decision, leaving our hero, DHH, feeling adrift after a burst of quashed activism.

As a playwright, there’s only one thing to do with a bunch of weird, conflicted feelings, and as DHH sits down to write something, fiction starts to get generously folded into Hwang’s review of the facts. Those facts are that Hwang followed up M. Butterfly in 1993 with a play called Face Value, an attempt to respond to the Miss Saigon controversy through comedy — which bombed so badly it closed on Broadway before it opened, after eight previews. The fiction embroils Hwang-as-DHH in his own casting debacle, giving him a chance to examine his “face” — his sense of self, yes, but also his pride, insecurity, and vanity — along with his relationship to the industry, to the country he calls home, and, perhaps most crucially, to his father.

Francis Jue played Henry Y. Hwang, or “HYH,” in Yellow Face’s 2007 premiere and, in a stroke of good fortune for the show, returns to reprise the role. He’s an expert comedian, grinning ear to ear as he asks his son for tickets to Miss Saigon (“Dave, you should do something like that”) and later revealing a tender, trusting heart only to have it broken. As an immigrant who dreamed of being “Gary Cooper or Clark Gable,” and who achieved considerable success as a banker in the country where he always imagined himself living his “real life,” HYH complicates his son’s notions of race, identity, and aspiration. There’s a big part of DHH that, out of love for his father and for his sake, wants to believe in an American ideal that he knows all too often proves cruelly empty. And it’s partly this strain of inherited utopianism and partly his own pride that lead him to stick his foot all the way down his own throat.

“There’s gotta be more Asian male actors out there,” moans DHH during auditions for the lead in his new play, Face Value. So why are they having so much trouble finding a “straight, masculine Asian leading man”? Enter Marcus G. Dahlman (Ryan Eggold) — tall, straight, masculine, easygoing … Asian? Not so much. (No spoilers here: We know he’s a white guy from the jump.) But through a series of miscommunications and a dose of wishful thinking bordering on denial, DHH casts him. Hwang revels in making his fictional self walk right into the snare and then stagger defiantly onward, too fearful of embarrassment to desist: Oh, that bear trap on my leg? No, yeah, that’s supposed to be there. It’s a new look. Intentional — yeah, that’s right. When Anderson’s Jerry Zaks, the director of Face Value, dares to ask, “But guys, does he … does he look Asian to you?,” DHH leaps to take umbrage with the speed and precision of an emotional Baryshnikov: “I gotta say, I find your question sort of offensive. Asian faces come in a variety of shapes and sizes — just like any other human beings. Which we are, you know.”

Welcome to your petard: Let the hoisting begin. In true farcical fashion, Yellow Face escalates quickly, with the all-too-earnest Marcus soon believing his own charade and DHH left gaping in the dust like Dr. Frankenstein, appalled at his creation. Hwang anticipated Rachel Dolezal by almost a decade, and his depiction of a similarly shocking figure in Marcus Gee (so the character renames himself) is both cutting and sympathetic. “I feel like I’ve finally found — a home,” stammers Marcus. This poor goof is no calculating villain; he’s just a lonely guy who’s not quite sharp enough to see the problem. In the end, Hwang, perhaps listening to the voice of his father, is generous with the hapless appropriator. HYH wanted to be Jimmy Stewart; Marcus G. Dahlman wants to be Bruce Lee — no, not even Bruce Lee. He just wants to belong to a community, to be “part of something.” Yes, there’s still a big difference between his dreams and Henry Hwang’s — but aren’t we all a bit addled and deluded by America’s promises of self-creation?

Generosity is also a key ingredient in the mortar that holds together Good Bones, the new play from James Ijames now debuting at the Public after a run last year at Washington, D.C.’s Studio Theatre. Like Hwang, Ijames is concerned with questions not only of race and bias but of how Americans are perhaps more shaped by the idea of Americanness than shapers of it. Good intentions, hero complexes, defensive individuality, susceptibility to certain ideas of progress — on these fronts, DHH and Aisha, Ijames’s protagonist, might have much to discuss. It’s prickly territory, but, in their different ways, Hwang and Ijames both navigate it with humor and humanity. Fundamentally, and despite plenty of reasons to throw in the towel, they like people.

Even, and perhaps especially, the tricky ones. “She’s tough, my wife,” says Travis (Mamoudou Athie), speaking of Aisha (Susan Kalechi Watson). He doesn’t elaborate, but the tone says enough. Aisha has come back to the unnamed city where she grew up in a series of housing projects that, in her words, “were never designed to be homes.” The memory of her childhood there — it could be Philly, it could be Baltimore, it could be any number of places — still chills and repulses her. She got out as fast as she could, and now, successful and well-dressed and with an independently wealthy chef husband in tow, she’s returned to try to put down roots and give something back. “The little girl that grew up in those projects just wants to heal that place,” she says to Earl (Khris Davis, funny, sharp-edged, and excellent), the contractor who’s completing a fancy kitchen for Aisha and Travis’s big new house. Earl’s impressed, maybe even a little smitten — at first. As a child of the projects who stayed, and who believes passionately in his community even as he’s watching it change, Earl naturally wants to celebrate Aisha’s success. “Wow. You a homegirl!” he says, his face lighting up. “That’s beautiful man.”

From Good Bones, at the Public Theater.
Photo: Joan Marcus

The light goes out when he finds out how exactly his new neighbor is planning to accomplish that “healing.” Aisha has the kind of job that’s hard to pack into a title, but it involves lots of emails, lots of money, and lots of moral gray: “I work with sports franchises that are looking to better position themselves in their cities,” she tells Earl. “I help develop partnerships with communities. Most people don’t see the benefits of these kinds of projects, so I sort of help the franchise speak the language of the community.” From another perspective, she helps bulldoze old neighborhoods, mostly inhabited by poorer folks and people of color, to make way for new stadiums. When Aisha protested that the sports complex she’s working on “will bring something like 6,000 new jobs to the city,” I shivered — I lived in Richmond, Virginia, for much of the pandemic, where residents have had to vote not once but twice to keep a casino from devouring the city’s south side. The mayor was furious, claiming, just like Aisha, that it would have been great for jobs.

You can obviously tell how I voted. But what keeps Ijames’s play from hardening into agitprop is the amount of space he makes for both Earl and Aisha and how much nuance he builds into them. I often wished that director Saheem Ali and scenic designer Maruti Evans had surrounded them with a similarly nuanced environment: Their rendering of Aisha and Travis’s remodeled mansion is colorless and characterless — all oppressive neutrals and towering shelves full of white ceramics kept behind glass, too random and too high up for any practical use. It’s true that Earl rants about the fashionable “monochromatic kitchens” of the wealthy, but he and Travis also agree that people, with money or without it, are always looking for “character and charm.” Nothing about the home onstage seduces us, but that seduction, that feeling of niceness that’s so apt to overwhelm our ethical angels, is partly the point. “I like that popcorn,” Earl’s sister Carmen (Téa Guarino) claps back at him when he grouses about “artisanal gourmet popcorn shops” taking over the block. “You like that popcorn.”

If Earl and Aisha have a tendency to stake out positions and dig in to defend them, they’re also big-spirited enough to keep trying to connect. Sometimes, it’s the people who love them who try to rebuild the bridges — Carmen, a smart, good-natured freshman at Penn who won’t be easily backed into any one-sided take, or Travis, whom Athie imbues with a sense of both pathos and backbone that emerges gradually and to real emotional effect. At first, Travis seems like a kind of modern George Tesman, Hedda Gabler’s blithely innocuous spouse, blessed by birth and not challenged much since. But again, Ijames complicates things: Travis might, on the one hand, be gentrification personified (the restaurant he’s opening serves “elevated” soul food and he does make a disastrous decision via a neighborhood reporting app), but he’s also an odd duck. He’s a Black man who bicycles, splurges on cute running shorts, says “Gosh!,” and, according to the stage directions, is “a big cuddler.” Athie gives him a sweet weirdness that throws a sidelight on the play’s central questions: If we find ourselves wondering how Black masculinity, or a neighborhood, or a community, does or should look, Good Bones is urging us to pause and to wonder instead how they could.

Yellow Face is at the Todd Haimes Theatre through November 24.
Good Bones is at the Public Theater through October 27.

Good Bones is at the Public Theater through October 27.

The Best of Intentions: Yellow Face and Good Bones