A Red-Faced Writer
With 'Yellow Face,' David Henry Hwang examines his own attitudes toward race
By Don Shirley
David Henry Hwang is on the hot seat in his new play Yellow Face, at the Mark Taper Forum. Or if it isn't precisely Hwang who's feeling the heat, it's a playwright character who shares his name and credits. As he grapples with the significance - and the limits - of racial identity, this character looks by turns confused, careless, and conniving. Sitting in the audience, you wonder if a playwright has ever been so self-deprecating.
Offstage, however, candor has its limits. Hwang refuses to discuss which parts of Yellow Face are fact and which are fiction. After I recite a list of striking similarities between his play's narrative and actual events, he confirms that he knew of these real-life facts but was "still going to try to duck" the question of whether these inspired his play.
Some of the correspondences between fact and fiction are obvious. The first part of Yellow Face explicitly recalls Hwang's role in a controversy from 1990-91. He and other Asian Americans assailed the casting of Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian engineer in the U.S. premiere of Miss Saigon. The role should have gone to an Asian or Asian American, they charged.
In the parts of Yellow Face that take place only a couple of years after the Miss Saigon flap, the apparently more fictional Hwang approves the casting of an unknown actor named Marcus G. Dahlman as the Asian American lead in one of his own plays, Face Value. Then he learns, much to his chagrin, that Marcus isn't Asian.
Marcus was "discovered" from an article about a small Marin County production of a play that's set during World War II, about a white G.I. and a Japanese American soldier in Europe. Although Marcus played the white guy, the casting director of Face Value supposedly confused the two actors and asks Marcus to audition for the lead. (How this happened needs clarification, especially since we later learn that the genuinely Asian co-star of the Marin production also auditioned for Face Value.)
Regardless of how it happened, the playwright likes Marcus. It's dicey for a prospective employer to ask an actor about his ethnic background, but Hwang concludes that Marcus has some Asian blood, despite his non-Asian look. Marcus is hired.
Later, when Hwang discovers that Marcus is white and Jewish, with no verifiable Asian ancestry, he tries to conceal that fact in their joint appearance before an Asian American group by identifying Marcus G. as "Marcus Gee." But after Face Value flops in Boston, Hwang replaces Marcus with a bona fide Asian actor. Yet "Marcus Gee" - now considered Asian - later snags the role of the Thai king in a touring production of The King and I.
Hwang wrote a real play called Face Value, and its leading actor, Dennis Dun, was indeed replaced after the Boston tryout. However, no one seems to have questioned Dun's Asian credentials.
Several years later, Hwang served as dramaturge for The Gate of Heaven, a two-man show about a Japanese American G.I. in Europe and a Holocaust survivor he rescued. It was written and performed by Lane Nishikawa and Victor Talmadge - who are Japanese American and Jewish Eastern-European American, respectively. The Gate of Heaven opened at a small community center in Marin County before playing several larger venues.
Later, Talmadge - the white guy in The Gate of Heaven - was cast as the Thai king in a touring production of The King and I. For the tour, he was frequently billed as "Vee Talmadge." That's what I called him when I reviewed the production in 1997. I didn't examine his ethnic background.
Talmadge's casting in The King and I was "one of several cases where Caucasians were cast as Asians that have gone under the radar," Hwang offers. But it wasn't under Hwang's radar - Talmadge called Hwang when he was cast, to ask his former colleague's opinion. According to both men, Hwang congratulated Talmadge but said he wouldn't discuss whether the casting was proper unless publicly asked. Asked now, Hwang says no, it wasn't proper.
Hwang has no firsthand knowledge of how Talmadge got the King and I gig. Talmadge admits his casting did seem "to come out of the blue" - he had never done a musical. But The King and I casting team had known his previous work and were reminded of him when they read an article about The Gate of Heaven, he says. Noting that others have detected slightly Asian features in his face, Talmadge states the King producers "felt I looked like I could be a King of Siam. But they knew I wasn't Asian."
The temporary use of "Vee" Talmadge? The producers thought that the casting of "Victor Talmadge" with his first co-star Hayley Mills "sounded too much like a Noel Coward comedy," says the actor. He suggested "Vee" but later dropped it - because he had established his reputation as Victor.
Besides the Talmadge case, Hwang says he also "worked with somebody else" in another show "and afterwards wondered if they were Asian." Of course, he's not naming names.
Hwang doesn't place as much emphasis on these matters as he once did. Married to European American actress Kathryn A. Layng (who is in Yellow Face), he has two biracial children, one of whom looks more Asian than the other, he says, adding, "I'm aware on a more visceral level that racial categories are more fluid and ambiguous."
Near the end of Yellow Face, he suggests the appeal of a fantasy future in which racial distinctions evaporate. Two years ago, Hwang told The Financial Times that in an ideal world, "James Earl Jones can be cast as George Washington. Jonathan Pryce can be cast as a Vietnamese pimp."
However, we're not there yet, he tells me. When there are so few Asian lead roles in show business, Asians should get them - and that goes for The King and I as well as Miss Saigon.
Neil LaBute wrote an essay recently in the Los Angeles Times in which he more or less said that the ideal world imagined by Hwang has arrived - that white actors should now be able to play Othello and August Wilson roles, just as black actors are sometimes seen in roles written as white. Wilson himself took the opposite point of view - that black actors should play only roles written as black. It's fun to imagine what he might think about LaBute's essay.
Me, I think that roles that are about race, at least to some extent, should be cast with race in mind. But the farther you stray from the subject of race, and from realism, the less it matters.
Of course the same questions are asked about issues other than race and ethnicity. Could a thin woman (padded, of course) play the title role in LaBute's Fat Pig, currently running at the Geffen Playhouse?
At any rate, for a more entertaining discussion of all of this than anything I might write, I recommend Yellow Face.
Published: 05/24/2007
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