An Interview with David Henry Hwang, Writer of ‘Yellow Face’

Key Art for ‘Yellow Face’ Courtesy of Audible.

David Henry Hwang is a highly accomplished playwright, and writer and he’s also a theater professor at Columbia University in New York City. His current project is Yellow Face, an Audible Original that is also an adaptation of the play of the same name that David wrote and produced in 2007, and we here at NTG had the distinct honor of sitting down with David to discuss this important story.
 
John Betancourt: I would like to start by getting to know what inspired you to want to adapt this as an Audible Original.
 
David Henry Hwang: Well, the impetus in a sort of “producorial” sense, came initially through Daniel Dae Kim, and the Director, Leigh Silverman, because Daniel’s company, 3AD has a deal with Audible. And in conjunction with sort of Leigh Silverman suggesting it, they decided to make Yellow Face their first project together. But when they brought the idea to me, I was incredibly interested in this possibility. Because of course, it's always… I love finding new ways and new forms, to share these stories with the world. But this seemed like a particularly good play for an audio format. Given that there are, you know, roughly 50 characters or so. Which in the stage version gets played by a company of six or seven actors. Whereas in this version, we could actually have that many voices, we could bring in cameos by the real-life people who are portrayed in in the play, and really realize this kind of Docu-drama, or mockumentary format that I had envisioned in a much more in a much more exciting fashion.
 
John Betancourt: Now this is a play. There's a novel version of this, what kind of challenges did you encounter in assembling this story in a broader format?
 
David Henry Hwang: I just want to say that the novel, although it has the same title, it's a totally different story, by different authors.
 
John Betancourt: Oh, my goodness, my mistake. As I look at my notes, I saw the published version of the play as a novel.
 
David Henry Hwang: No, that's fine. And in terms of the adaptation, I think like, I was saying earlier, because there were, there are, so many characters, and because also the scenes kind of clip along in the play, there wasn't really a lot of work that I had to do in adapting the play into the audio format, it seemed to happen quite naturally, there are sort of tweaks and things that I've excised, and, you know, cuts that I've made. But by and large, the play, lend lends itself very well, to this format.
 
John Betancourt:  Why do you believe that the story continues to have such longevity?
 
David Henry Hwang: It's been kind of gratifying and very satisfying that Yellow Face as a play has seemed to grow in its kind of influence and reach since we originally did it in 2007. And I think that the issues that are at its core have become more relevant, more understood, more discussed in society at large, for instance, this notion of representation and who gets to play who, in 2007, that was, you know, still relatively an obscure issue, where it's now, most people are very familiar with this. And the kind of debates back and forth, which we found when we started, we did a table read of the script, when we began this process for the audio play, and felt that actually, this is funnier than it was in 2007. The reason being, that we are more familiar with these issues. And so, the humor that comes from someone, for instance, you know, DHH, my character trying to pretend or cover up the fact that he accidentally cast a white guy as an Asian in his own play. That is funnier now than it was then.
 
John Betancourt: And obviously you mentioned there's some gratification there. To expand on that further, what does it mean to you, though, to be able to have a story that has had this kind of endurance and this kind of attention to it?
 
David Henry Hwang: I'm still absorbing that, which, you know, because this Audible version has now dropped, and we're doing it on Broadway this fall. So Yellow Face is kind of having a mainstream moment that it hadn't had before. And I'm still, yes, enjoying it, but also trying to understand it myself. You know, because I am fortunate to have a couple of things, plays that continue to have life, M. Butterfly, of course, being another one of them. It's… you don't know when you write them, and you don't know when they're first performed; is this going to continue to be relevant and is it going to speak to an audience. And so, I, in the best possible interpretation of this longevity, it means that the play and I guess, therefore me, the play was able to anticipate things that have continued to happen and become even more central to the culture.
 
John Betancourt: Let’s talk a bit about how layered the story is, that's what impressed me the most, was just how much was in this. And since you have such global topics as representation, but also some very personal pieces on identity, what went into the decision to begin with, to create a story this deep, quite frankly.
 
David Henry Hwang: Um, I mean, I don't know that I knew when I started writing it that I was going for something deep, per se, I think that I wanted to explore in the play, in the play within a play, Face Value, which was my big Broadway flop in ‘93, I wanted to explore this idea of a comedy of mistaken racial identity. And that show was, you know, one of the biggest flops in Broadway history. But I continued to think it was this idea of mistaken racial identity was a good one. And so when I hit on this mockumentary format, with a character that I named after myself, in the center, I felt there was some relationship between that real life event, the protesting of the casting of Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian Pimp in the original version of Miss Saigon, there's a relationship between that real life event and the real life event, which ends the play, which is the charges leveled against my father by the New York Times for allegedly laundering money for China, which happened in the late 90s. And it felt there was a relationship between those two things, and I wrote the play to figure out what that relationship was.
 
John Betancourt: That makes total sense now, because there’s earnestness to this, and that kind of understanding of just who we are, and I really appreciated that. But with that in mind, obviously now with, this story being available to people in so many ways, what are you hoping audiences take away from the story in 2024?
 
David Henry Hwang: Yeah, I think one of the things that I'm interested in saying in 2024, is that DHH, the character named after me, is, in some ways, the dumbest character in the show. I mean, he's the one who's making all the mistakes, who's trying to cover up his tracks out of vanity out of, you know, to protect his reputation as an Asian American role model. And eventually, he has to admit that and then in 2024, it might be useful to say, you know, it's okay to make a mistake. That we all… just because we're human, sometimes with the best of intentions, are going to do something that's bad. And if we face it, and admit it and apologize for it, which DHH eventually does in the play after lots of contortions, then we can continue and try to live our best lives again.
 
John Betancourt: Now we've kind of touched on it a bit, but this is probably more relevant than it has ever been before in so many ways, not that it wasn't a relevant story to begin with, because I think you're right, there was a lot of important pieces that were there in 2007. But now it seems like it's just the right time to release it. Why do you believe this is probably the right time to bring the story back to life.
 
David Henry Hwang: Um, we're in at a moment in our country's history where there's a lot of debate about around issues of representation, and, and a lot of division and the opportunity to hear a story like this, which also makes you laugh, I think hopefully can help us feel more open towards one another. Also, there is in the story of how my father got accused of allegedly laundering money for China. There is the truth that the lives of Asian Americans, historically have always been a function of America’s relationship with a root culture, Asian country, whether it's the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II or hate against Muslims and South Asians after 9/11. And what we saw just recently, in the pandemic was another example of this. The pandemic being characterized as the “China virus,” and then attacks on AAPIs spiking. So that dynamic is very present and relevant today. And is part of Yellow Face.
 
John Betancourt: I do have to ask, because maybe, I guess I have framed this story a bit as super serious, when it isn't all serious. How did you as a writer, integrate comedy into such a serious topic?
 
David Henry Hwang: I think naming the character after myself, gave me license to be more comic, to portray him more absurdly, because the best comedy comes out of things that are real. And when we talk about some of the excesses of your surrounding the sort of birth of multiculturalism, it was, I think, easier to name the character after myself so that I was only making fun of me and not somebody else.
 
John Betancourt: The last question that I have for you today, what are you most proud of when it comes to this particular piece of work?
 
David Henry Hwang: I'm proud that I had the courage to write something that was really personal. And try to create what I think was a new form, which is this kind of stage mockumentary, now an audio played mockumentary. And that something that I thought was very personal and would only appeal to the Asian American community actually demonstrates this notion that the specific is the universal and now is able to speak to a wide audience to make them laugh and to be produced on Broadway.
 
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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