Yellow Face at Theatre Raleigh

Yellow Face explores the lines between truth and fiction; they blur with hilarious and moving results in David Henry Hwangs unreliable memoir. 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.