Review: Daniel Dae Kim as a Playwright Unmasked in ‘Yellow Face’

To write yourself into your own play is to put on a very curious mask. If it’s flattering, is it honest? If it’s honest, why bother?

Those questions, both as artistic choices and as problems of social identity, are powerfully and hilariously engaged in the revival of David Henry Hwang’s “Yellow Face” that opened on Tuesday at the Todd Haimes Theater. The answers are deliberately equivocal. On one hand, this Roundabout production, directed (as was the 2007 original) by Leigh Silverman, stars the exceedingly likable and handsome Daniel Dae Kim as Hwang’s stand-in, called DHH. On the other, this DHH is a worm.

So too is the sinuous story, which requires a ton of exposition to get on its way. DHH, exactly like Hwang, won a 1988 Tony Award for his Broadway debut, “M. Butterfly.” His 1993 follow-up, “Face Value,” won only notoriety. Closing before its official New York opening, it earned the nickname “M. Turkey.”

“Face Value” was Hwang’s theatrical response to the “Miss Saigon” controversy, in which the producer Cameron Mackintosh, importing that megamusical from London in 1991, sought to import its star, Jonathan Pryce, as well. But because Pryce is white, and his character is Eurasian, protests against the casting ensued. Nevertheless, the show went on — and on and on — with Mackintosh dismissing the dispute as “a storm in an Oriental teacup.”

Hence “Face Value”: a broad farce, set in part at the “Imperialist Theater,” about the casting of a white actor in the title role of a musical called “The Real Fu Manchu.”