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‘Yellow Face’ Review: Daniel Dae Kim Leads a Witty, Powerful Broadway Staging of David Henry Hwang’s Comedy
The “Lost” star gives a rich comic performance on in David Henry Hwang’s wry, slippery, Broadway comedy about racial identity.
Here, Kim — an actor likely best known for TV’s “Lost” — narrates his character’s recollections of a turbulent time in his artistic and personal life; the play chronicles DHH’s unpleasant experience of serving as a voice on a political issue whose complexities seem to evade his grasp. Butterfly.” That work is internecine, designed both as a retelling of a real-life sex scandal involving a French diplomat and a Chinese spy but also as a critique of stories Westerners tell about Asia, like the opera “Madame Butterfly.” But it found a major audience — earning a Tony for Best Play — and positioned Hwang as a cultural force at a moment when conversations about representation in art were in a more nascent stage. Which meant that when a scandal around cross-racial casting broke — with the acclaimed British actor Jonathan Pryce, who is white, playing an Asian character in the “Madame Butterfly” adaptation “Miss Saigon” first in London and then in New York — DHH was a natural choice to weigh in.
Or read this on Variety
