Yellow Face

Yellow Face is a semi-autobiographical play written by American playwright, screenwriter, and opera and musical librettist David Henry Hwang. Hwang is best known for his 1988 Tony Award-winning play, M. Butterfly. Yellow Face premiered in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum in 2007 and has been performed Off-Broadway at the Joseph Papp Public Theater and in the UK at the Royal National Theater. The play earned Hwang his third Obie Award in Playwriting and his third nomination as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Drama. In 2013, Yellow Face was adapted into a YouTube video by director Jeff Liu, and in September 2024, the play will premiere on Broadway at the Todd Haimes Theater.

Part parody and part memoir, the play features the character DHH, a fictionalized version of Hwang. After publicly protesting the casting of a white actor for an Asian role in the stage production of Miss Saigon, DHH discovers that he has mistakenly hired a white actor to play the role of an Asian character in his latest play, Face Value. As DHH attempts to hide his error from public discovery, he comically struggles to maintain his authenticity and define what it means to be an Asian American artist and activist. The play explores the historical marginalization of Asian Americans, cultural identity and authenticity, and the tensions between artistic freedom and the burden of representation. The character DHH also appears in Hwang’s 2016 musical, Soft Power.

This guide refers to the 2009 Theatre Communications Group Kindle Edition. 

Content Warning: This section discusses stereotypes of, and racism against, Asian people.

Plot Summary

Yellow Face is a non-linear, satirical play in two acts that follows the life of DHH, a prominent playwright loosely based on the play’s author, David Henry Hwang. The play’s plot dramatizes three real events from Hwang’s life in the 1990s: his protest against the yellowface performance in Miss Saigon; the failure of his play, Face Value; and the anti-Chinese Senate investigations into illegal campaign contributions that targeted Asian Americans like Hwang’s father, Henry Y. Hwang. Most of the action takes place in the United States during the 1990s with short, interspersed scenes set in China in 2006. The play frequently breaks the fourth wall. Two different actors play the lead roles of DHH and Marcus G. Dahlman, while the remaining five cast members each play multiple roles as various producers, news reporters, politicians, and prominent Asian American artists. 

The play begins with DHH announcing that in 2006, he received an email from Marcus G. Dahlman. Chinese folk music plays in the background as Marcus recites his message and describes his soul-searching journey to China after his downfall in the United States. DHH explains that both he and Marcus were involved in a scandal, though only Asian Americans still wonder what happened to Marcus. 

The play shifts to a series of flashbacks. In 1990, successful playwright DHH learns from actor B. D. Wong that the musical Miss Saigon will feature a yellowface performance by white actor Jonathan Pryce. Incensed by the offensive portrayal, DHH writes a letter of protest to the union, Actors’ Equity. The press leaps on the controversy, and DHH, who is regarded as the face of Asian Americans in American theater, becomes the central “face” in the debate around cultural authenticity and artistic freedom. Prominent non-Asian members of the theatre community lambaste Actors’ Equity’s decision to ban Pryce and any other actors from performing in yellowface as a form of censorship. Anxious about his reputation, DHH stops attending rallies. The union bows to public pressure and reverses its decision. Pryce continues to perform in yellowface in the musical, and Miss Saigon becomes a critical success. 

Much to DHH’s consternation, his father, wealthy banker HYH (short for Henry Y. Hwang) heralds Miss Saigon’s plot for its beauty and realism. DHH points out the play’s orientalist and sexist portrayals of Asian people, but HYH identifies with the touching story about the desire to live a real life in America. HYH is a patriotic American and suggests to his son that he write a play more like Miss Saigon instead of the weird M. Butterfly. 

Two years later, DHH writes a play inspired by the Miss Saigon controversy called Face Value and struggles to find a male Asian actor to play the lead. He eventually casts Marcus G. Dahlman after seeing his impressive audition and learning that Marcus received positive reviews for his small-town performance in Go for Broke, a play about Japanese American soldiers during World War II. At the opening night party for Face Value, DHH learns that Marcus played the role of the white lieutenant in Go for Broke and is not of Asian descent as he had assumed. Horrified that he has unintentionally created a yellowface performance by casting a white person to play an Asian role, DHH hides his mistake by covering up Marcus’s real identity. He convinces Marcus to use the stage name “Marcus Gee” and proclaim his Russian Jewish heritage as Siberian Eurasian. 

At an event with Asian American students, Marcus is hailed as an Asian American role model and is touched by the unconditional support he receives from the community. DHH maintains the charade so that he can fire Marcus without violating the union’s policies against racial discrimination. Face Value receives disappointing reviews and shuts down before officially opening. DHH is gutted by the play’s failure and ignores Marcus’s phone calls to talk about what happened. 

Three years later, DHH is working as a director for the Far East National Bank where his father is CEO. He is shocked to learn that Marcus has been continuing to represent himself as a person of color and has garnered success playing “authentic” Asian roles. Marcus becomes a devoted Asian American activist and urges DHH not to judge him based on his looks. Offended by Marcus’s appropriation of Asian American cultural identity, DHH refuses to help Marcus when he becomes one of the over 1,000 Asian Americans who are under investigation for alleged illegal campaign contributions to the Democratic Party. He says that if Marcus wants to live as an Asian American, then he must deal with the real-life consequences of that identity. DHH decries Marcus for being a phony and accepts a job as a consultant on Margaret Cho’s sitcom, All-American Girl. He advises the showrunners to make the show “more Asian” by adding more chopsticks and an abacus to the set. 

Anti-Chinese sentiments escalate in US politics, and Marcus asks DHH to join him and protest the accusations of espionage against Wen Ho Lee. DHH ignores his request and flippantly comments that the nuclear scientist might be guilty of being a Chinese spy. To DHH’s dismay, the US government investigates his father for his bank’s involvement in campaign contributions. HYH is suspected of helping China influence US elections. Inspired by Jimmy Stewart’s movies, HYH believes he can convince the Senate and the American public not only of his innocence but of their own guilt in discriminating against Asian Americans. His idealism is shattered when he is denied a new bank charter and sees his reputation tarnished in the press. HYH dies of cancer disillusioned with his faith in America. 

DHH convinces Marcus that if he truly cares for the Asian American community, he should go public with his real identity as a white man. Marcus understands that the admission will ostracize him from the community that he loves, but his confession will help discredit the Senate investigations by exposing how the government’s xenophobic paranoia led them to suspect a white man of being a Chinese spy. DHH joins Marcus at an interview and takes responsibility for creating and perpetuating the lie. 

The play ends with a metatheatrical exchange between Marcus and DHH. Marcus announces that he is a character in the play and demands that DHH explain why he created him. DHH explains that Marcus functions as a double for himself to explore his own self-exoticization and performance of yellowface as an Asian American role model. He also created Marcus to cope with his father’s death; Marcus functions as a wish-fulfillment of his father’s idealistic belief that in America, people can become anyone they want to be. Marcus tells DHH that DHH no longer needs him and asks him to write a happy ending for his character. DHH concludes the play in the same setting as its opening. Marcus is in China in 2006, and the Dong villagers have invited him to sing in their communal songs. DHH states that as for himself, he is still searching for his own face.