49 pages • 1 hour read
David Henry HwangYellow Face
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Act I, Pages 7-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Act I, Pages 7-8 Summary
The play opens on a dark stage as the folk music of the Dong people, an ethnic minority in China, plays in the background. The lights come up to reveal the actors, who remain seated on the stage when not performing their parts. Two actors portray DHH and Marcus throughout the play, but the other five actors perform a combination of roles. Each of these actors plays roughly 15 to 20 different characters, and the role of The Announcer introduces each new character.
DHH narrates that in 2006, he, David Henry Hwang, received an email from Marcus G. Dahlman. The actor playing Marcus recites the message’s content, which describes his trip to discover the “soul of China” after the fallout of a scandal in the United States. He tells DHH that the songs of the Dong people are meant to be sung together by all the villagers. The music stops, and DHH explains that Asian Americans still wonder what happened to Marcus, the white actor he had mistakenly cast for an Asian American role in his play over a decade ago. He states that mainstream media rarely notice an Asian American celebrity, but the scandal around Marcus even got the attention of Senator John Kerry. DHH believes that Asian Americans have forgiven him for his part in the scandal since he is a respected member of the community and has appeared on national television.
Interspersed throughout DHH’s monologue, actors portray a disappointed John Kerry, the playwright Frank Chin denouncing Hwang as a “white racist asshole” (8), and Lily Tomlin announcing the 1988 Tony Award for M. Butterfly. DHH performs his acceptance speech and declares that Asian Americans have had few opportunities as actors. He references the yellowface performances of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and David Carradine in Kung Fu and passionately announces that this erasure stops now.
Act I, Pages 9-13 Summary
The setting shifts to New York in 1990. DHH receives a phone call from actor B. D. Wong and learns that the UK stage production of Miss Saigon will be touring on Broadway. DHH mentions that his friend Roz Chao had seen the musical with Jonathan Pryce, a white actor, in yellowface as an Asian pimp with his eyes taped for the part. DHH is confident the US will not allow such an outdated and offensive practice, but Wong informs him that the producers will retain Pryce. DHH wonders if Pryce might be part Asian or a Korean adoptee. Incensed that the performance harkens back to the days of blackface, he types a letter of protest to the Actors’ Equity Association, a national union.
In his letter, DHH praises Pryce as an actor but objects to the yellowface performance that is just as outdated as depictions of Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu. He adds that he is equally against blackface. Various actors recite coverage of the controversy from the New York Times, the New York Post, The Daily News, The National Review, and Pravda, a Soviet newspaper. The protest leads to DHH meeting with the play’s team. Producer Cameron Mackintosh, casting director Vinnie Liff, and President of Schubert Theaters Bernard Jacobs each take turns defending their decision and accuse DHH of overreacting and restricting artistic freedom. Despite DHH’s claim that actor John Lone had contacted their office, they insist that they searched the world and could not find any talented Asian actors for the part.
Actors’ Equity responds by barring white actors from playing Asian roles, and Mackintosh cancels the show rather than replace Pryce. Several members of Actors’ Equity petition the union to reverse their decision while prominent figures like Ed Koch, Dick Cavett, and columnist George F. Will weigh in on the controversy and accuse Actors’ Equity of racism and censorship. Asian American activist Carla Chang encourages DHH to attend a rally to end yellowface forever and calls the protest their “Rosa Parks moment.” She needs DHH since his name is recognizable in the papers. DHH worries he will be labeled a “poster child of political correctness” and does not attend (13). After a month of protests, Actor’s Equity reverses its decision, and the play proceeds with Pryce’s performance to critical success.
Act I, Pages 13-16 Summary
Sometime after the controversy, DHH has a telephone conversation with his father, HYH (Henry Yuan Hwang). HYH believes his son was smart to protest the Miss Saigon casting because it gave him free publicity. HYH reads from his collection of newspaper clippings and is impressed that big names like Charlton Heston went on record to disagree with his son. HYH touts the success of Miss Saigon and its cast of “beautiful” and “classy” women. DHH retorts that the play features Asian women as sex workers and perpetuates the Madame Butterfly stereotype of Asian female submissiveness, themes which he critiqued in his own play, M. Butterfly. HYH tells his son he found his play “weird” and asks for theater tickets to see Miss Saigon instead.
HYH is unimpressed with his son’s newest play in progress, a deconstruction of Rudyard Kipling’s works. He suggests that DHH write something like Miss Saigon, a play that was successful because the desire to live in America is real. He identifies with the character of the Vietnamese girl who killed herself because her life was not worth living if it was not in America. Referencing Hollywood cinema as “real” and his life in Shanghai as “fake,” HYH tells his son that once he became a wealthy banker with a Mercedes and kids in elite colleges, he knew he was living a real American dream. DHH tells his father that he has given him an idea for a new play.
Act I, Pages 7-16 Analysis
Yellow Face blurs the distinction between fiction and reality by opening with a dramatization of Hwang’s experiences during the Miss Saigon protests of 1990. DHH’s letter to Actors’ Equity and the quotations from newspaper excerpts and celebrity responses are taken from real life. DHH also names prominent Asian Americans such as Frank Chin, widely regarded as the pioneer of Asian American theater, and actors “Roz” Chao (Rosalind Chao), B. D. Wong (whom DHH familiarly calls “Bradd”), and John Lone. Through DHH’s protest of Miss Saigon, Hwang addresses The Historical Marginalization of Asian Americans in American culture while highlighting the contributions of real Asian Americans in theater, film, and television. Hwang’s goal in including real events and people is to address the serious and sensitive topic of race and representation through a parodic lens.
At the same time, Hwang portrays protagonist DHH as self-important and egotistical. DHH refers to himself as “the first Asian playwright to have a play produced on Broadway” and uses nicknames for famous people to show off his “insider” status (8). DHH’s pomposity hints at his insecurity, both about his status as an artist and about his identity as an Asian American. In the play, Frank Chin, the first Chinese American playwright to produce a play off-Broadway, insults DHH. The insult alludes to Chin’s controversial 1989 essay, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” in which he accused prominent Asian American writers including Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and David Henry Hwang of pandering to white audiences. Chin regarded writers who achieved mainstream success as inauthentic and fake. Chin’s brief appearance in Yellow Face highlights the debates and contestations within the Asian American community and demonstrates the diversity and heterogeneity of Asian American identities, setting up the theme of Cultural Identity and Authenticity.
As the Miss Saigon controversy gains more publicity, DHH begins to struggle with his identity and responsibilities as a member of the Asian American community and an individual artist. His dilemma is echoed in Joseph Papp’s comment, “As a producer, I have concerns about anyone imposing conditions, but as a citizen […] I think Equity did the proper and heroic—” (12). Papp was a pioneer of non-traditional casting, and Hwang’s inclusion of Papp’s support highlights the theme of the tensions between Artistic Freedom and the Burden of Representation. DHH’s protest against yellowface brings attention to the hegemony of white actors who have been entitled to play any role they choose. Yet, his critique is twisted in the press and by others who do not see white privilege, and DHH is instead accused of racism and censorship. He responds to the controversy by backing out of rallies and shrinking from the public debate. DHH’s concern that the cancellation of Miss Saigon is “starting to make us [Asian Americans]—look bad” illustrates that he is more concerned about reputation than principles and convictions (13). Carla Chang believes the protests are an opportunity to “stop yellow face forever!” (12), yet DHH chooses to drop out of the protests to save his own “face” or popular image in the media.
The blurring of fiction and reality also contributes to Hwang’s critique of the American dream. To his father, HYH, the Hollywood version of American life is more real than his life was in Communist China. His dreams of success are antithetical to his homeland’s official ideology. In America, HYH becomes the ideal capitalist, the founder of a bank who takes pride in his expensive luxury car, fancy house, high-rise office, and kids “all in top colleges” (16). He regards DHH’s name in the papers as a sign of an immigrant success story. In contrast, DHH’s body of work focuses on American imperialism and European colonialism. His references to M. Butterfly and a work-in-progress deconstructive play on Rudyard Kipling signal DHH’s commitment to exposing orientalism, a concept coined by theorist Edward Said to critique the West’s representations of the East as its inferior.
Although DHH seems appalled by his father’s naive and uncritical worship of American capitalism, he also shares his father’s optimism when he initially believes that US theaters would never tolerate yellowface. DHH believes that the white status quo in theater roles and casting has too long remained unchallenged, and the controversy initially inspires him to speak out and protest. The controversy of the Miss Saigon casting foreshadows and intersects with the real-life financial scandal that Hwang’s father encountered and which the play dramatizes. Just as DHH feels he must choose between being an artist and being an Asian American, HYH learns that no matter how much he endorses American values, he will continue to be viewed as a perpetual foreigner.
Related Titles
By David Henry Hwang
