Welcome to the weekly TV thread.
The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Mark Mothersbaugh and John Enroth’s “Acting Strange” from Interior Chinatown.
A couple of weeks ago, I watched WNET’s presentation of Daniel Dae Kim and Ryan Eggold in the recent Broadway version of Yellow Face, David Henry Hwang’s 2007 semi-autobiographical play, from Great Performances, the PBS anthology series that’s a great way for folks like me who don’t avidly watch plays to experience one without leaving home. Until June 30, Great Performances is posting all 105 minutes of the Yellow Face revival on its official site.
Director Leigh Silverman’s Roundabout Theatre Company production of Yellow Face is a wonderfully acted version of a play that takes a pair of subjects that are no laughing matter, especially to Asian American writers like me—the sight of white actors stealing roles from Asian actors and the Republican Party’s anti-Asian paranoia—and sharply finds the humor in them.
An example of the “documentary theatre” genre, Yellow Face mixes fact with fiction and centers on a fictionalized version of Hwang known only as DHH. He leads protests against Miss Saigon (the protests were an actual thing) and its producers’ decision to give the role of a biracial Vietnamese pimp to Jonathan Pryce, a thespian who’s so white he makes Casper the Friendly Ghost look like Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. But then DHH mistakenly thinks Marcus G. Dahlman, a white actor, is half-Asian and casts him as the Asian lead in his ill-fated play Face Value (the casting mistake wasn’t an actual thing, while the premature demise of Face Value was).
DHH farcically does damage control, while Marcus, to DHH’s dismay, goes through a phase where he thinks of himself as an Asian activist, and HYH—DHH’s Chinese immigrant father and the founder of a successful California bank—becomes the target of a Senate witch hunt against Chinese political donors. Most of the actors in Yellow Face juggle multiple roles—non-Asian actors of color played Asian American characters and white celebrities in the Broadway version—while the leads who star as DHH and Marcus play only one role.
“We all had some pretty deep and extensive conversations about how to cast this play and trying to do so as mindfully as possible,” said Hwang to Kim and Silverman in a PBS featurette about the Great Performances presentation of Yellow Face. “And during the original Miss Saigon fight, people who were supporting Jonathan Pryce’s right to play the Eurasian engineer would make the argument, ‘Well, it’s acting. It’s just acting,’ which is not accurate because it neglects some kind of institutional biases and the way in which the system was set up to give white actors the opportunity to play a lot of other parts and not others. But it’s not entirely wrong, that argument either: the idea that it’s just acting. So in this version, we decided we wanted to push that envelope a little and have people of color playing other people of color.”
The first time I experienced Hwang’s play was a 2013 feature-length Yellow Face adaptation produced by Justin Lin’s now-defunct YOMYOMF Network YouTube channel, which divided the film into two parts on YouTube. (Pronounced “yawm-yawm-eff,” YOMYOMF is an acronym for “You offend me, you offend my family,” a repeated line in Finishing the Game, the 2007 mockumentary in which Lin imagined Hollywood’s attempt to complete the filming of Bruce Lee’s unfinished Game of Death as a farcical disaster.) Jeff Liu, the director of the film version, was partially influenced by vlog-inspired storytelling techniques that were popularized by The Guild and The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and were new at the time.
Though I wasn’t a fan of Liu’s decision to shoot many of the film’s scenes like a vlog, the sharpness of Hwang’s dialogue still shined through, and the best scene was a verbal duel between DHH, played by Ryun Yu from FX’s Baskets, and an unnamed white reporter who interviews him about the case against his dad for the New York Times and has no idea how racist his questions are. People from the left who think of the New York Times as nothing more than birdcage lining these days will enjoy this scene.
Yu was surrounded by a top-flight cast that included Sab Shimono as HYH (whom Hwang based on Henry Y. Hwang, his late banker father), Covert Affairs hunk Christopher Gorham as Marcus (whom Eggold, the star of New Amsterdam, played in the Broadway version), a pre-Maze Runner Ki Hong Lee, Gilmore Girls alum Emily Kuroda, and Linda Park. Three Asian American YouTubers—Tim Chantarangsu and the Fung Brothers—cameoed as college students in DHH and Marcus’s panel discussion scene. The standout performer in the YOMYOMF version was Park, one of the actors who took on multiple roles, and she got to shine in ways that were only rarely glimpsed in her role as timid linguist Hoshi Sato on Star Trek: Enterprise.
In the Broadway version, the standout performer was Francis Jue, who juggled a few characters, including HYH, whose role was slightly increased in the Broadway version, and he won a Tony for his work. Jue became the first Asian American actor to win in the Tonys’ Featured Actor in a Play category since BD Wong in Hwang’s M. Butterfly in 1988, and he ended his acceptance speech with words of encouragement to anyone who’s currently being wrongly persecuted like his HYH character was (“For those who don’t feel seen, for those being targeted in authoritarian times, I see you, and I hope that encourages you to be brave and dream big”).
Kim, who previously played DHH in Audible’s 2023 audiobook version of Yellow Face and hadn’t acted on the stage in eight years, also made Tony history this year as the first Asian American actor who was nominated for Best Leading Actor in a Play. (He didn’t win.) On the stage, he clearly relished displaying his comedic side in front of Avatar: The Last Airbender fans who know him only from his multiple roles in the Airbender franchise or audience members who know him only for his non-comedic work as hunky Jin-Soo Kwon, the reluctant mob enforcer from Namhae on Lost (Conrad Ricamora, another Asian American Tony nominee this year, said in an interview that he admired Kim’s portrayal of Jin because Jin was an Asian male character who was allowed to be “strong and sexy and powerful”), or his much less intriguing role on CBS’s famously troubled-behind-the-scenes Hawaii Five-0 reboot.
Kim and Grace Park’s departure from Five-0—where Kim played a younger reimagining of Detective Chin Ho Kelly—over the producers’ refusal to give them pay equity with their white co-stars was one of the most admirable “fuck you, pay me” moves in network TV history. Both versions of Five-0 were generic pro-cop bullshit. Five-0 didn’t deserve Kim. The material he got to play in the thought-provoking and provocative Yellow Face is not at all generic.
The one thing I don’t like about the Great Performances presentation of Yellow Face is that all the curse words were censored, which softens the play’s provocativeness. Instead of WNET bleeping out the profanity, the cast members actually went back and dubbed themselves. The new, more family-friendly lines don’t match the actors’ lips. However, Kim and his co-stars do ADR really well. This isn’t the network TV version of Die Hard 2, where, because Bruce Willis was busy noodling on his harmonica, 20th Century Fox brought in a guy who sounds less like Willis and more like Peter Onorati or a terrible James Gandolfini impersonator and then got him to say, “Yippee-ki-yay, Mr. Falcon.”
Like in the YOMYOMF version, the best scene in the Broadway version is DHH’s tense conversation with the racist Times reporter. Because the Great Performances presentation is a recording of the Broadway version when it was performed at the Todd Haimes Theatre, you get to hear the audience laugh and gasp during the interview scene, and it adds a lot to the scene. Also, Kim and Greg Keller, the raspy-voiced actor who played the reporter, were energized by the audience, while Yu and Michael Krawic, the bald guy who played the reporter in the YOMYOMF version, were merely solid when they performed the scene.
The Yellow Face revival was a terrific play that’s worth watching on the Great Performances site until June 30, and Kim should stay the fuck away from CBS cop shows that are made for 86-year-old redcaps forever.
Today’s prompt: Name a non-musical stage play that blew you away. My favorite live theatrical experience was watching Patrick Stewart perform his one-man version of A Christmas Carol in the Bay Area during Star Trek: First Contact’s first few weeks in theaters. He portrayed every single character and even an inanimate object: the fiddle a musician brought to Fezziwig’s Christmas party.