YELLOW FACE Comes to Grand Central Art Center

The Wayward Artist presents the Obie Award winning play Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang. Also selected as a “finalist” in the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Yellow Face performances begin Friday, September 15th and run through Sunday, September 24th at the Grand Central Art Center in downtown Santa Ana. This acclaimed theatrical work is unique in that it is both fact and fiction.  

In an interview with the Washington Post, David Henry Hwang said, “The main character is named after me and based on me. There are some things in it that are true and there are some things in it that aren’t true. There is this kind of postmodern idea of playing with your own identity in the construct of yourself as the author.”  

  

And so, the lines between truth and fiction blur with hilarious and moving results in Yellow Face. The story begins back with the Miss Saigon controversy. Asian-American playwright DHH, fresh off his Tony Award win for M. Butterfly, leads a protest against the casting of Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian pimp in the original Broadway production of Miss Saigon, condemning the practice as “yellowface.”  

His position soon comes back to haunt him when he mistakes a Caucasian actor, Marcus G. Dahlman, for mixed-race, and casts him in the lead Asian role of his own Broadway-bound comedy, Face Value.  

When DHH discovers the truth of Marcus’ ethnicity, he tries to conceal his blunder to protect his reputation as an Asian-American role model, by passing the actor off as a “Siberian Jew.” As he clings to his old multicultural rhetoric, this new racist witch hunt forces DHH to confront the complex and ever-changing role that “face” plays in American life today.  

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