Tony-winning playwright David Henry Hwang blurs fact and fiction in the most devilishly clever of ways while tackling issues of racism and race in his 2007 off-Broadway hit Yellow Face, now provoking gales of laughter, plenty of post-performance discussion, and an unexpected tear or two at Beverly Hills Playhouse.

The facts are as follows.

Not long after his 1988 Tony-win for M Butterfly, Hwang led an unsuccessful effort to persuade Actors Equity to bar Caucasian actor Jonathan Pryce from reprising his role as Miss Saigon’s half-Asian Engineer in the hit musical’s transfer from London’s West End to Broadway.

 Hwang then wrote Face Value, a play that imagined a couple of Asian actors attempting to disrupt a Miss Saigon-like production by infiltrating its opening night audience in white face, a comedy so universally panned that it never made it from Boston to Broadway despite the presence of Jane Krakowski and cast replacement BD Wong.

Finally, Taiwanese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee was indeed accused of treason (and cruelly and unjustly placed in solitary confinement) in the late-1990s during an outbreak of anti-Chinese paranoia that victimized David’s banker father Henry Y. Hwang as well.

Where playwright Hwang veers from the truth to hilarious effect is in imagining that the actor Wong replaced was not Asian-American Dennis Dun but an entirely fictional (and 100% Caucasian) San Francisco thespian named Marcus G. Dahlman, cast on the optimistic presumption that there might be a drop or two of Asian blood running through his veins.

 When suspicion arises that Marcus (TV star-handsome Roman Moretti) might actually be every bit as white as say Brad Pitt, DHH (Jeffrey Sun) comes up with the fabrication that the half-Jewish Marcus’s Jewish half came from China-adjacent Siberia, then starts attacking the so-called racism of those who accuse Marcus of “not looking Asian,” and even goes so far as to persuade Marcus G. Dahlman to adopt the more Asian-sounding stage name Marcus Gee.

By throwing political correctness to the wind, playwright Hwang mines abundant laughter from such hot-button issues as racial stereotyping and the very nature of race itself as its two protagonists find themselves choosing success over principles to outrageous effect. (Just wait till you see what role “Marcus Gee” undertakes following his ignominious firing.)

 Director Robert Zimmerman stages Yellow Face with all but one of its seven actors seated upstage as the seventh company member announces characters as diverse as Senator John Kerry, producer Cameron Mackintosh, Face Value’s Wong and Krakowski, real-life figures who then rise to either give their take on l’affaire Face Value or participate in one-on-ones with DHH or Marcus.

Firescape Theatre (The Beverly Hills Playhouse Of San Francisco) debuted the Zimmerman-directed Yellow Face up north in 2016, and with its two leads and three of its featured players (Alfonso Faustino, Jennifer Vo Le, and John Pendergast) having since relocated to Beverly Hills, Yellow Face 2.0 arrives with five already finely-tuned performances matched by L.A. additions Dennis Nollette and Lisagaye Tomlinson.

The dynamic Sun and the charismatic Moretti anchor the production quite splendidly, the former increasingly frazzled as events spin out of control, the latter (in a performance that won him the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle award as Best Featured Actor) progressively more puffed up as his newly embraced “Asian” identity tales hold.

 Faustino scores laughs as DHH’s banker dad, then breaks hearts as Wen Ho Lee, Le burns up the stage as Marcus’s girlfriend Leah, Nollette earns hisses as assorted dastardly gents, Tomlinson’s Jane Krakowski and Dorothy Hwang bend races and genders to engaging effect (as do some of Le’s characters), and these roles are just the tips of some very entertaining icebergs as each actor tackles a dozen or so additional roles, from newspaper columnists to reporters to students to politicians to celebrities, and more.

Last but not least, Pendergast (who can earn laughs simply by announcing a name like “Producer Joe Papp” or “Former New York Mayor Ed Koch” in the most stentorian of voices) takes fire as NWOAOC, a conniving reporter whose name has been “withheld on advice of counsel,” hence the acronym.

Production design, simple but effective, is entirely uncredited. Stage manager Edward Hong doubles as DHH understudy alongside fellow covers Cate Bidwell, B. Jordan Reed, and Melodie Shih.

A welcome transfer south from the city by the bay, Yellow Face adds up to the side-splittingest and most talk-provoking show in town.

Beverly Hills Playhouse, 254 S. Robertson Blvd, Beverly Hills.
www.firescapetheatre.com

–Steven Stanley
August 17, 2018
Photos: Megumi Smisson

Tags: Beverly Hills Playhouse, David Henry Hwang, Los Angeles Theater Review