No, this is not Yellowface, by Rebecca F. Kuang, and it's definitely not The Adventure of the Yellow Face, by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Yellow Face (two words) was originally a semi-autobiographical play by David Henry Hwang. It premiered in 2007 (and there's a Youtube version available in two parts here and here). Hwang was the first Asian American playwright to win a Tony (that was for his 1988 production, M. Butterfly, which was a reworking of the story in Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly).

Audible, just this month, brought out an audio-version, one of their "Originals". You can find the full cast list here, but the bottom line is that it was a very slick and really enjoyable production.


There's a lot of manipulation embedded in this story...

The plot goes like this (and you shouldn't read further if you've not yet listened):

Playwright DHH, who is well known for protesting the hiring of a Welsh actor to play a Eurasian character in Miss Saigon (in 1990), inadvertently casts a white actor, Marcus G. Dahlman, in the lead role of his new play, Face Value (which, to make things worse, is based on that previous controversy).

He discovers his mistake, but cannot legally fire Marcus on the basis of race... So he has him adopt the stage name Marcus Gee, and concocts a story about his Siberian and Jewish ancestry. This all makes for great comedy, as well as asking serious questions about who has the right to play whom. But Face Value is a failure, and everyone moves on. DHH takes up a position on the board of his father's bank.

The plot becomes twistier, however, when DHH hears that Marcus has continued to play Asian roles, has become an activist for Asian American rights, and is dating DHH's former girlfriend, who is convinced he is Asian. DHH confronts him, and accuses him of being an "ethnic tourist". Marcus sees no problem with his choices, but for DHH, that's precisely the issue: Asian Americans don't get to have choices. If Marcus had genuinely been born as part of a minority, he'd know that.

And the plot turns even darker when government authorities start to get involved. A rather scary-sounding committee is investigating alleged overseas influence in election campaign financing, which has been channelled by Chinese Americans. They investigate DHH's father, HYH. This is the patriotic guy who is proud to live in America; who sees it as a promised land where people can carve out their own futures; who loved Miss Saigon, and saw no problem with it; who saw in all the American movie stars he idolized his own real persona just trying to get out; and who accepts "Marcus Gee" for who he is trying to be...

Meanwhile, the degree of success Marcus has had in espousing his new identity is shown by the fact that the investigation committee also targets him...

Running along in the background, meanwhile, is the case against Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese American nuclear scientist, who has been accused of spying for China.

There's a neatly revealing little conversation between DHH and a journalist, who asks whether HYH identifies more as American or Chinese. DHH asks whether the reporter sees himself more as American or more as white... Fair point, but the reporter says that is not at all the same thing... Pressed a little further, he comes right out with the statement that there's no conflict between being white and being American... Ahhh, so there we have it... If you're not white, you're different; and if you're different, you're suspect, you're likely to be "conflicted".



Eventually Marcus "comes out", supported by DHH, who takes joint responsibility for creating and perpetuating the lie that is Marcus.

And at the end, DHH and Marcus charge through the fourth wall, and reveal that Marcus is fictional. He has played his part, and now he demands a happy ending. This explains the beginning of the play, where we find Marcus revelling in his (distinctly orientalist-sounding) life at the heart of a minority ethnic community in China...

So Marcus is fictional. But so much in the play isn't. Hwang did indeed protest the "yellowface" casting of Miss Saigon; he wrote an unsuccessful play called Face Value; his father was investigated over political financing; Wen Ho Lee was wrongfully imprisoned as a Chinese spy; and although election finance laws were broken by just a handful of Asian Americans, the rest of that community felt betrayed by the way they were all tarred with the same brush.

These racially tinged political issues, of course, are still very much with us. As this commentary says of the original piece: "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." And that was written in 2010... How much worse must it be now...

Nor have identity issues gone away. Commenting on the new Audible release, this source argues: "Yellow Face is as timely as ever, wrestling with issues of cultural appropriation, complicity, and artistic freedom."

I particularly liked the way the play doesn't offer black-and-white pronouncements (beyond castigating the tendency to automatically suspect all people of a certain ethnicity of involvement in things they have no control over -- but that's the kind of categoric judgement I can get behind).

Asian American Literature Fans again: "[Hwang] 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)."

He invites to really think what we understand by identity. In an interview, he insists that our ethnic identity is not the be-all-and-end-all of who were are. Rather, it's one piece of a complex picture. If, then, you are defining your identity exclusively by your skin colour, then in a way you are replicating the deceptivness and artificiality of "yellow face" -- effectively, you're creating a mask that hides the complexity that is the real you.



Rebecca F. Kuang -- the author of Yellowface, who deliberately didn't expose herself to this play until her book was out, for fear of inadvertently drawing from it -- commented a propos of the original: "It is so clever and hilarious. I love this passage, and I’ll be thinking about this for a long time: 'DHH: Okay. Years ago, I discovered a face -- one I could live better and more fully than anything I’d ever tried. But as the years went by, my face became my mask. And I became just another actor -- running around in yellow face. (Pause) That’s where you came in. To take words like 'Asian' and 'American,' like 'race' and 'nation,' mess them up so bad no one has any idea what they even mean anymore. Cuz that was Dad’s dream: a world where he could be Jimmy Stewart. And a white guy -- can even be an Asian.'"

So this immensely rich little play asks us to confront two pivotal sets of questions: 1. What does it mean to be an "Asian American", and what kind of problems does that label expose you to? And 2. What even is "identity"? To conceptualize this elusive thing as anything other than dynamic, fluid, and peformative is to lock people into straighjackets, and nail a mask to their faces. (Taylor Michelle Wycoff has a great discussion of the different elements that crop up in Hwang's interrogation of identity.)

All up, very clever. To create a piece that stays funny, sharp, and snappy, and yet invites us to really think -- that's an art.