David Henry Hwang’s identity crisis
David Henry Hwang’s play Yellow Face exemplifies the diversity-inclusion-equity (DIE) games that no doubt will continue at the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) even after federal funding is withdrawn.
Hwang, the Chinese-American playwright of M Butterfly — the stone-faced, gender-bending update of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly — has cemented his reputation for political correctness by specializing in racial (ethnic) discourse. Yellow Face debuted in 2007, was revived to much acclaim in 2024, and recently received several Tony Award nominations. PBS is now airing a recorded performance of the show.
The national exhibition of Yellow Face confirms Hwang’s grasp of progressive dramaturgy — a skill akin to writing successful grant proposals — in which personal experience is prized as political testament. The semi-autobiographical play recounts DHH’s own struggle session when he attacked the Broadway musical blockbuster Miss Saigon in 1990 for casting a white actor (Jonathan Pryce) as its Eurasian lead character.
Hwang’s vainglorious campaign underscores his later experience producing his next play, Face Value, and facing the death of his father, Henry Yuan Hwang (HYH), a patriotic immigrant and founder of Far East National Bank. Yellow Face suits PBS through its acronyms and coded blackout sketches that generate notions about ethnic identity. It’s Hwang’s satire of demoralized patriotism. His disillusionment perpetuates DIE ideology in one convenient package.
The term “yellow face” suggests a Spike Lee ploy, a mongrelized variation on “blackface,” the familiar name for the parody (sometimes self-parody) of black American performers since 19th-century minstrel shows. Hwang’s borrowing claims similar ethnic-group skepticism, yet Yellow Face does exactly what Hwang blamed Miss Saigon for doing, then overstates it: often doubling the seven-member, multiracial cast in an identity roundelay.
Hwang employs “yellow face” (and the Chinese notions of “self-respect” and “saving face”) conditionally, as instruction to the audience on the race-baiting standards that have overtaken contemporary theater, television, movies, and the press.
Unlike the fresh vision of immigrant heritage in Hwang’s early, most affecting play, The Dance and the Railroad (1981), he now — at age 67 — twists that insight in a manner that fools Millennial audiences and the Broadway and television elite into feeling smart about their political cynicism. That’s the tailor-made PBS format.
At first, Yellow Face offers a facetious and overly complicated panorama, shuffling Daniel Dae Kim’s glibly intellectual DHH and Francis Jue’s heartfelt HYH among the Asian, black, and white supporting actors who portray various egotistic New York professionals. This multicultural circus indulges the racial stereotyping that should be Hwang’s subject. Instead, he parodies the new segregation that limits actors to playing only roles that match their birth identity, replacing artistic liberty and surprise with the self-deceiving limitations of all-wise smugness. He includes a major character, Marcus — DHH’s white alter ego passing as a Siberian Jew (played by Ryan Eggold) — who absconds to China to worship Old World heritage. This auto-fiction pretends an ultra-progressive perspective, but Marcus is nothing more than an opportunistic MacGuffin, another PBS staple.
The play’s ultimate farcical stunt occurs when a New York Times reporter (ironically named “Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel”) interviews celebrity and ethnic spokesman DHH but is surreptitiously probing the financial impropriety of his father, HYH, who is being investigated by Congress. Hwang briefly questions the media’s legitimacy when DHH argues: “Can you imagine how idiotic their investigation will look when this government spends millions of taxpayer dollars just going after a 100 percent white American?”
This defensive rant ought to sting, but it doesn’t land, given Broadway’s ongoing anti-Trump bias and the atmosphere of retribution in legacy media. Hwang’s sentimental claim that “filial piety is deeply ingrained in Chinese culture” doesn’t excuse the play’s fraudulent argument. (Movie lovers will recall the emotional power and linguistic wit of Akeelah and the Bee when its black junior-high-school heroine gratefully spells out “philiopietistic.”) But that stumble constitutes Hwang’s only confrontation with the hypocrisy that ruins Yellow Face and its inherent PBS conceit.