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.