Tony Award-winning playwright, composer, and writer, David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly, Chinglish), joined us to celebrate the highly anticipated release of Yellow Face, the Broadway Edition. This laugh-out-loud, semi-autobiographical work uses Hwang’s lived experience to highlight the complexities of race, while urging the audience to challenge their blind spots. Hwang was joined in conversation by James Ijames (Fat Ham), Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, director, actor, and educator.
Featured Book
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Yellow Face
By David Henry Hwang
Published by Theatre Communications Group
Part biography, part comic fantasy, Yellow Face is David Henry Hwang’s sendup of anti-Asian stereotypes and the traps he falls into searching for acceptance in a not-so-colorblind world.
The play starts in the 1990s as the fictional DHH is casting Miss Saigon and unwittingly casts a white actor in the role of the engineer. This happens alongside the real-life investigation of Hwang’s father, the first Asian American to own a federally chartered bank, and the espionage charges against physicist Wen Ho Lee. Adroitly combining a light touch with weighty political and emotional issues, Hwang creates “a docu-style comedy recounting [a] controversy from his point of view” (Washington Post). This Broadway Edition includes updates and reflections that bring new urgency to a landmark work, adeptly balancing the comedy and seriousness of the stories portrayed. Having originally debuted Off-Broadway in 2007, the core takeaway is this: Yellow Face remains as poignant as ever.
In Conversation
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David Henry Hwang
David Henry Hwang
David Henry Hwang’s work includes the plays M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, Chinglish, The Dance and the Railroad, and FOB, as well as the musicals Aida, Soft Power, Flower Drum Song, and Disney’s Tarzan. Called America’s most-produced living opera librettist, he has written thirteen libretti with composers such as Philip Glass, Osvaldo Golijov, and Huang Ruo. He was also a Writer/Producer for the Golden Globe–winning television series The Affair. Hwang is a Tony Award winner and four-time nominee, a Grammy winner and two-time nominee, a three-time Obie winner, and a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. He was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame and has been honored with the Dramatists Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
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James Ijames
James Ijames
James Ijames is a playwright, director, actor, and educator. Ijames was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Fat Ham. His other awards include a Pew Fellowship, the F. Otto Haas Award for Emerging Artist, the Terrence McNally New Play Award, a Whiting Award, a Kesselring Prize, and a Steinberg Prize. His other plays include The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington and White. He resides in South Philadelphia.
Photo Credit: Lowell Thomas
