By Lucy Komisar
The under-story of David Henry Hwang’s play is more important than the obvious story line.
In this compelling autobiographical work, DHH (a strong Daniel Dae Kim, playing Hwang), tells how he challenged a decision to cast a white British actor Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian pimp in “Miss Saigon.” Pryce is shown with a taped Asian-style slanted eye. In the play, a Vietnamese woman, 17, who turned to prostitution to survive, kills herself so the child she had with a soldier can go to America. How racist is that! Send the kid to the wonderful country that destroyed yours!
In his play, DHH says, “Mr. Pryce is an excellent actor, but I would be equally upset were he cast as [an African American character like] Boy Willie in [August Wilson’s play], “The Piano Lesson.” Actors Equity first supports him, then capitulates to the producers.
The play first appeared in 2007 as “Face Value” and was not a success. This one certainly should be.
The “story” focuses on a bizarre tale of mistaken identity. Hiring an Asian for his new play, DHH choses Marcus (a slightly pretentious Ryan Eggold), who in fact is Jewish, but claims to be Siberian. Siberia is in Asia, right? I found that obviously not believable. But director Leigh Silverman runs it as a good “stay with me and wait for the dénouement.”
More important, which Hwang slips into the story of anti-Asian racism that caused some Asian actors to lose jobs, there were other more oppressive attacks, one very close to home — on his father.
He is HYH (a fine, soft-spoken Francis Jue), a banker and super patriot who in 1997 started Chinese Republican Bankers for Clinton. Let’s not get started on his naïveté! He gets an FBI call, because he made that donation through his small Far East National Bank. Asians are being surveilled, though that word is not used.
Then he mentions the story of Wen Ho Lee (also played by Jue), a Taiwanese-American nuclear scientist and a mechanical engineer who worked for the University of California at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The FBI threatened to go after his wife. He was indicted in 1999 for stealing secrets for China about the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Lee was put in solitary for nine months, then the charges were dropped.
It was part of the invented Chinese “espionage scandals” of the late 90s. We hear no-nothing senators such as Shelby, DeLay and Brownbach vituperate at hearings.
DHH talks to the New York Times reporter (an appropriately self-important Greg Keller) who wrote about Lee moving Chinese money to the U.S.
DHH says, “The reporter who broke these stories found so many evil Asians.” He tells him, “You will be in the play.” The reporter: “You can’t use my name.”
But I can. The reporters were Tim Golden and Jeff Gerth. And the story is here.
These stories remind one of the attack by then New York Attorney General Cyrus Vance Jr., on the ethnic-Chinese owned Abacus Bank accused of falsifying loan applications so that borrowers would qualify for mortgages. After legal actions that cost the bank’s family owners $10 million, they were exonerated by a jury that rejected every one of the spurious charges. The “corrupt” guy here turned out to be Vance. See the documentary on video.
Marcus, the “Asian Jew,” turns out to be fiction. (Like Hwang’s “M Butterfly,” a character may not always be what he seems.) DHH says, “The character was created by me. In the end its always about me.”
But the rest of the story is not. This an important play about the destructive results of the deep state’s never-ending hunt for global enemies bent on destroying America, when they really should just look in the mirror.
For more of the true story, go to this stomach-churning text from the play and the (fake) media reports.
“Yellow Face.” Written by David Henry Hwang, directed by Leigh Silverman. Roundabout Theatre Company, at Todd Haimes Theatre, 227 West 42nd St., NYC. Runtime 1hr40min. Opened Oct 1, 2024, closes Nov 24, 2024.