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David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face
Mar. 5th, 2010 04:07 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
pylduck.livejournal.comDavid Henry Hwang's Yellow Face
I taught the script of David Henry Hwang's latest play Yellow Face a few weeks back and also caught a performance of the Mu Performing Arts production at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.
It's really quite a wonderful play though its meta-commentary about Asian American theater and recent Asian American (cultural) politics might make it hard to follow for those unversed in these worlds and histories.
The play stars the character DHH, a fictional representation of the playwright himself, as he reflects on the Miss Saigon controversy; yellow face (casting white actors in Asian roles) more generally in American movies and theater; the campaign finance investigations of the 1990s when Chinese American donors to Clinton's campaign were accused of influencing the American democratic process on behalf of China; and the false imprisonment of Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese American nuclear scientist, as a spy for China. The play is definitely about the 1990s and early 2000s, a moment when the media was painting China as the new BIG BAD after the fall of the Soviet Union. Of course, with 9/11, things got muddled a bit, but if you pay attention now, there are returning rumblings about how China is out to get us in America (think about all the paint, toys, dog food stuff that blames manufacturing in China for death and illness, for example).
Anyways, the play also centers on DHH's father HYH and a white actor named Marcus G. Dahlman. The father has very idealistic visions of America as a fiscally conservative banker (he heads up the Chinese American Republican Bankers for Clinton group), believing that it is the promised land where anyone can be whomever they want to be. He notes that his financial success was only possible in America, and that when he was in China, there was never any possibility of succeeding in the way that he has in the United States. He idolizes Frank Sinatra (who does thing "my way") and other white actors like Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper.
Marcus Dahlman gets mistakenly cast as an Asian American by DHH in his play about yellow face and the Miss Saigon controversy. At the encouragement of DHH (for the playwright to save face), he adopts the stage name Marcus Gee. Later, he takes up Asian American causes, becoming a political activist on behalf of Asian Americans, and this kind of off-stage yellow face disturbs DHH.
The play ultimately is about DHH coming to terms with his father's death and his disillusionment with the promises of America when his bank comes under investigation for possible campaign donation indiscretions. The final moments of the play are especially important as the character DHH breaks the fourth wall and explores the fictional quality of all the characters (and some events) on stage.
The play script does something interesting in terms of casting, too. There are only a handful of actors specified but scores of characters in the play. Hwang suggests different ways that the actors can take on various roles, and in the production I saw, the characters rotated through the roles by highlighting impersonations (of celebrity figures and national politicians) in a caricature-like mode. That is, they emphasized mannerisms, accents, and forms of speech that really mark particular public figures.
I also found it especially useful to think about this play's examination of race in the theater alongside questions raised by Diana Son's play Stop Kiss--a play I mentioned on this community a few years back and that I've been haphazardly writing an essay on for at least as long. In Son's play, the characters are not explicitly marked as of any particular race, but the setting in New York City and the references to the characters' pasts can be productively read as revealing racial identifications. Hwang's play has a lot to say about our assumptions of which people can play which racially-marked roles and why we need to pay attention to those assumptions. He doesn't offer a simple answer to the question of race-specific or "color-blind" casting, but he does try to broaden the question to consider what it means to identify as of a particular race or to cross-identify (to identify with a race that is not your own, in terms of cultural activities or political activities).
I taught the script of David Henry Hwang's latest play Yellow Face a few weeks back and also caught a performance of the Mu Performing Arts production at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.
It's really quite a wonderful play though its meta-commentary about Asian American theater and recent Asian American (cultural) politics might make it hard to follow for those unversed in these worlds and histories.
The play stars the character DHH, a fictional representation of the playwright himself, as he reflects on the Miss Saigon controversy; yellow face (casting white actors in Asian roles) more generally in American movies and theater; the campaign finance investigations of the 1990s when Chinese American donors to Clinton's campaign were accused of influencing the American democratic process on behalf of China; and the false imprisonment of Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese American nuclear scientist, as a spy for China. The play is definitely about the 1990s and early 2000s, a moment when the media was painting China as the new BIG BAD after the fall of the Soviet Union. Of course, with 9/11, things got muddled a bit, but if you pay attention now, there are returning rumblings about how China is out to get us in America (think about all the paint, toys, dog food stuff that blames manufacturing in China for death and illness, for example).
Anyways, the play also centers on DHH's father HYH and a white actor named Marcus G. Dahlman. The father has very idealistic visions of America as a fiscally conservative banker (he heads up the Chinese American Republican Bankers for Clinton group), believing that it is the promised land where anyone can be whomever they want to be. He notes that his financial success was only possible in America, and that when he was in China, there was never any possibility of succeeding in the way that he has in the United States. He idolizes Frank Sinatra (who does thing "my way") and other white actors like Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper.
Marcus Dahlman gets mistakenly cast as an Asian American by DHH in his play about yellow face and the Miss Saigon controversy. At the encouragement of DHH (for the playwright to save face), he adopts the stage name Marcus Gee. Later, he takes up Asian American causes, becoming a political activist on behalf of Asian Americans, and this kind of off-stage yellow face disturbs DHH.
The play ultimately is about DHH coming to terms with his father's death and his disillusionment with the promises of America when his bank comes under investigation for possible campaign donation indiscretions. The final moments of the play are especially important as the character DHH breaks the fourth wall and explores the fictional quality of all the characters (and some events) on stage.
The play script does something interesting in terms of casting, too. There are only a handful of actors specified but scores of characters in the play. Hwang suggests different ways that the actors can take on various roles, and in the production I saw, the characters rotated through the roles by highlighting impersonations (of celebrity figures and national politicians) in a caricature-like mode. That is, they emphasized mannerisms, accents, and forms of speech that really mark particular public figures.
I also found it especially useful to think about this play's examination of race in the theater alongside questions raised by Diana Son's play Stop Kiss--a play I mentioned on this community a few years back and that I've been haphazardly writing an essay on for at least as long. In Son's play, the characters are not explicitly marked as of any particular race, but the setting in New York City and the references to the characters' pasts can be productively read as revealing racial identifications. Hwang's play has a lot to say about our assumptions of which people can play which racially-marked roles and why we need to pay attention to those assumptions. He doesn't offer a simple answer to the question of race-specific or "color-blind" casting, but he does try to broaden the question to consider what it means to identify as of a particular race or to cross-identify (to identify with a race that is not your own, in terms of cultural activities or political activities).
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