In 1991, Miss Saigon transferred to Broadway.  Jonathan Pryce, a white Welshman, was reprising the role of the Engineer, a Eurasian hustler.  Early in the run, he had applied makeup and tape to his face to appear more Asian.  Instead of speaking Vietnamese, the cast spoke gibberish.  Many Asian Americans—and anyone, I would hope, who thought this sort of thing went out with the early talkies—were upset.  Among them was David Henry Hwang, author of M. Butterfly, a critique of Miss Saigon’s source material and the first play by an Asian American writer to win the Tony.

Sixteen years later, Hwang wrote Yellow Face, a heavily fictionalized account of his role in the controversy, which is currently being revived by Roundabout at the newly renamed Todd Haimes Theatre.  In Yellow Face, Hwang is a naïve do-gooder who assumes that the best argument wins the war of ideas and that those in power are acting in good faith.  When he hears the news about Pryce, he delivers the play’s funniest (and saddest) line: “I know how to stop this thing in its tracks.  I’m gonna write—a letter!”

Turns out, this sort of thing didn’t go out with the early talkies.  When Actors’ Equity refused to allow Pryce to play the part, most of the cultural elite were decidedly pro-yellowface.  They ranged from George Will (“the trendy racism of Actors’ Equity”) to Frank Rich (“Jonathan Pryce’s brilliant performance is as essential to Miss Saigon as Joel Grey’s was to Cabaret”) to Dick Cavett (“Bonehead Decision of the Year”).  Only Joe Papp seems to have been able to acknowledge that one can oppose both censorship and racism at the same time.

The central relationship in Yellow Face is between the playwright (Daniel Dae Kim) and his father (Francis Jue), a Republican banker who doesn’t care that Miss Saigon is racist—he’s swept up in the “beautiful” love story.  And he is proud of his son’s newfound infamy.  It doesn’t matter that Charlton Heston said he was “ashamed” to be a member of Actors’ Equity, “When I was working in a laundry, could I ever have dreamed?  That one day Charlton Heston would write—about my son?”  It’s a funny and sweet dynamic, and Jue is hysterical. It reminded me of Philip Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, arguing with his own father over a different Broadway musical: the “shtetl kitsch” of Fiddler on the Roof.

So long as the play focuses on these characters and the original controversy, it is successful.  However, by the end, Hwang has piled up a series of outrageous plot points—he accidentally casts a white actor to play an Asian character in his play-within-the-play, his father is under investigation for breaking campaign finance laws and aiding a foreign power—and the whole starts to become a little unthreaded, the satire a little dulled.  Nonetheless, Yellow Face more than earns its 105 minutes with a solid first half.

Yellow Face runs through November 24th at the Todd Haimes Theatre.  227 W. 42nd Street  New York, NY.  1 hour 45 minutes.  No intermission. Photograph by Joan Marcus.