“Yellow Face” follows the misadventures of an Asian American playwright named DHH who leads the protest against the yellow face casting, only to mistakenly cast a Caucasian actor in an Asian role in his own play. The film is based on David Henry Hwang’s play of the same name for which he received his third Obie Award in Playwriting and made him a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Hwang is an acclaimed playwright whose works include “FOB”, “Golden Child”, “Aida”, “Chinglish” and “M. Butterfly” for which he won the Tony Award.
The lines between truth and fiction blur with hilarious and moving results in David Henry Hwang’s unreliable memoir. Asian-American playwright DHH, fresh off his Tony Award win for M. Butterfly, leads a protest against the casting of Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian pimp in the original Broadway production of Miss Saigon, condemning the practice as “yellowface.” His position soon comes back to haunt him when he mistakes a Caucasian actor, Marcus G. Dahlman, for mixed-race, and casts him in the lead Asian role of his own Broadway-bound comedy, Face Value. When DHH discovers the truth of Marcus’ ethnicity, he tries to conceal his blunder to protect his reputation as an Asian-American role model, by passing the actor off as a “Siberian Jew.” Meanwhile, DHH’s father, Henry Y. Hwang, an immigrant who loves the American Dream and Frank Sinatra, finds himself ensnared in the same web of late-1990’s anti-Chinese paranoia that also leads to the “Donorgate” scandal and the arrest of Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee. As he clings to his old multicultural rhetoric, this new racist witch hunt forces DHH to confront the complex and ever-changing role that “face” plays in American life today.
“Yellow Face” is directed by Jeff Liu, Literary Manager at East West Players, and features a cast with experience in film, TV, theater and YouTube including Ryun Yu, Christopher Gorham, Linda Park, Sab Shimono, Emily Kuroda, Ki Hong Lee and Justin James Hughes.
Yellow Face Part 1
Yellow Face Part 2
Yellow Face Deleted Scene – Wen Ho Lee
Yellow Face – A Behind-the-Scenes Look
