For the final production of its 2023-2024 season, Peterborough’s New Stages Theatre Company is presenting a staged reading of Yellow Face by Tony Award-winner and three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist David Henry Hwang.
Almost 80 per cent sold out, the final production will be put on for one night only at Market Hall Performing Arts Centre at 7 p.m. on Sunday, June 9th. The evening will include a special post-show question-and-answer session with the performers and guests, as well as an announcement about New Stages’ 2024-25 season.
Yellow Face is a fast-paced, hilarious, and thought-provoking contemporary comedy about a playwright who, despite being an advocate against “yellowface” casting, unwittingly hires a White actor to play the Asian lead in his play.
With no costumes or sets, the staged reading stars six professional actors performing over 60 characters.
Colin Doyle will be recognizable to New Stages’ audiences after his debut in Keith Barker’s This is How We Got Here in 2023 as well as three seasons with Millbrook’s 4th Line Theatre. M. John Kennedy, head of the acting program at Randolph College for the Performing Arts in Toronto, grew up in Peterborough and was most recently seen on the Market Hall stage as George Bailey in New Stages’ holiday production of It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play. Last summer, he performed a lead role in 4th Line Theatre’s production of D’Arcy Jenish’s The Tilco Strike.
Joining the lineup are four more renowned Canadian performers. Norman Yeung has multiple film and television credits (Resident Evil: Afterlife, Todd & the Book of Pure Evil) and has been on stages across Canada including the Stratford Festival. Tina Jung is a recent nominee for a Canadian Screen Award for portraying Sam on CBC’s You’re My Hero. Toronto-based Richard Tse is recognizable for his roles in Second Jen and Baroness Von Sketch Show. Chloë Dirksen has returned to Canada after working in theatres around the world for 25 years, with credits alongside Alec Baldwin, Estelle Parsons, and Blythe Danner, among others.
Yellow Face is named for the practice of casting Caucasian actors in roles of Asian characters by relying on physical and cultural stereotypes. The equivalent of “blackface” or “redface,” yellowface dates back to early forms of minstrelsy but was still very common in the early 20th century, as evident in blockbuster films like Katherine Hepburn’s 1944 role in Dragon Seed, and the Charlie Chan films in the 1930 starring Warner Oland.
The practice even continued well into the latter half of the 20th century and can be found as recently as Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1961 and Peter Sellers in The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu in 1980.
Hwang’s story, however, is inspired by the controversy over the casting of Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce to play a Eurasian character in the 1989 stage musical Miss Saigon — a retelling of the opera Madame Butterfly set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. When the play opened in London, Pryce wore prosthetics to alter the shape of his eyes and makeup to colour his skin while playing the role of a Eurasian pimp called the Engineer.
Hwang, whose own play M. Butterfly had hit Broadway in 1988, became a face of the first major movement against yellowface casting after protests began when producers tried to bring Miss Saigon to Broadway with the same cast in 1991. While the grassroots protests led the Actors’ Equity Association to initially declare it could not support the choice of casting, the association eventually reversed its decision and Miss Saigon went on to become one of Broadway’s longest-running musicals, with 4,092 performances over 10 years.
A semi-autobiographical play that David Henry Hwang describes as “a kind of unreliable memoir,” Yellow Face‘s protagonist “DHH” is named after and based on the playwright himself — including his involvement in the Miss Saigon controversy. After the character DHH writes a play called Face Value, he casts an actor he believes is part Asian in one of the lead Asian roles, and then discovers the actor is fully White. Afraid he will be accused of yellowface casting but unwilling to fire the actor on the basis of race, DHH then creates an elaborate deception that has far-reaching consequences.
“DHH is the most foolish character in the show, giving audiences permission to laugh at controversies over race and culture,” Hwang wrote in The Guardian in 2014. “And perhaps laughter leaves us a bit more open to consider differing points of view.”
Yellow Face premiered in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum in 2007 before going Off-Broadway for the 2007-08 season. It won Hwang his third Obie Award in Playwriting and the play was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.
Since then, the play has been produced in the United Kingdom and Australia, and in Toronto in 2011 by the fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company and Hart House Theatre. Yellow Face will be making its Broadway debut this fall, with Daniel Dae Kim (Lost, Hawaii Five-O) portraying DHH.
A story about race and culture, show business, anti-Asian racism in America, and family, Yellow Face is a “wickedly funny and provocative night of theatre,” according to New Stages Theatre Company.
“You’ve never seen a play quite like Yellow Face,” says New Stages artistic director Mark Wallace in a media release. “I can’t wait to share it with our audience and see how they respond.”
Following the performance of Yellow Face, the audience is invited to stay for a special question-and-answer panel with the actors and the creative team to discuss issues raised in the play. Joined by Michael Walters of Toronto’s Dayton-Walters Castings, the panel will discuss authenticity in casting today, the roles actors should or should not be cast in, and how casting has changed over the years.
Priced at $22 ($11 for arts workers, students, or those who are under-employed), tickets for Yellow Face are available in person at the Market Hall box office (140 Charlotte St, Peterborough), by phone at 705-775-1503, or online at tickets.markethall.org. Recommended audience is 12 and over due to some coarse language.
kawarthaNOW is proud to be media sponsor of New Stages Theatre Company’s 2023-24 season.
