Playwright David Henry Hwang’s “Yellow Face” is currently running at Shotgun Players in Berkeley and on PBS’s Great Performances. The Berkeley production is more impactful than the streaming version, a video capture of last year’s three-time Tony-nominated Broadway staging (The awards ceremony is June 8). Alas, that’s not flattery; it’s comparing flat to flatter.
Hwang’s semiautobiographical satire springboards off the controversy that followed British actor Jonathan Pryce, who is white, being cast as the Eurasian male lead in the original 1990 Broadway production of the musical “Miss Saigon.”
Hwang was among the community leaders who demanded that an Asian-American play the role. While Pryce did end up with the part, the debate amplified concerns about inequitable opportunity for minority theater artists that have both begun to be addressed and continued to grow more complex in the intervening decades.
Hwang’s script for “Yellow Face” touches on provocative social, moral, and aesthetic topics. But it frequently feels more like a self-aggrandizing ramble than an absorbing drama. Constructed as a series of short black-out scenes that leave little room for character development or palpable emotion, “Yellow Face” renders complex ideas with the vitality and depth of a PowerPoint retrospective.
While the imposition of a glassy screen further cools the effect of the PBS version, the in-person energy and agility of Shotgun Players’ cast, most of whom play multiple roles, manages to reach beyond the fourth wall enough to keep audiences engaged, if never enthralled.
Hybrid confusion
In addition to the alienating slideshow click of its narrative, Hwang’s script combines docudrama and sheer fabulation with no discernible rationale. It leaves audiences puzzling over factual accuracy rather than encouraging them to focus on more resonant matters of identity and artistic freedom.
After spearheading the “Miss Saigon” protests, Hwang’s stage avatar, called DHH (Ben Chau-Chiu, believably blasé), inadvertently casts a white actor, Marcus Dahlman (William Brosnahan) as the Asian American lead in a play of his own.
He then covers up his error rather than correcting it, opening the door for Markus to become a celebrated community spokesperson. This fictional plot line is the show’s least credible element; it comes off more ridiculous than satirical.
The play also explores DHH’s sometimes awkward relationship with his immigrant father. Like the real-life Henry Y. Hwang, HYH (Joseph Alvarado) achieves great success as an American banker, affording his son unusual privilege, only to have his Yankee Doodle delusions crushed by a Congressional financial corruption investigation politically motivated by anti-Chinese bias.
But instead of elevating the theme of a battered American Dream, the play hones in on details of the actual inquiry (already two decades past when “Yellow Face” premiered in 2007) along with those of the government’s subsequent, similarly prejudiced espionage accusations against Taiwanese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee. Hwang mires timeless topics in dated specificities.
Director Daniel Eslick and his cast of six do their best to enliven Hwang’s high-flown, low return cogitations, but the script leaves little breathing room. On Clint Sumalpong’s museum-like set, vitrines exhibit historic tokens of racism (including a portrait of Mickey Rooney as bucktoothed Mr. Yunioshi in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”) and the actors don’t play flesh-and-blood characters so much as line-delivering animatronic figures. Hwang’s all-too-clever hall of precedents has little to say about the present or future.
‘Yellow Face,’ through June 14. $23-$80. Shotgun Players’ Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley.
http://www.shotgunplayers.org
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