June 9, 2011
By Jodie Jacobs
Chicago theater goers can become better acquainted with the wry humor of award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang, this summer. Arguably, they are familiar his M. Butterfly although they might not have recalled the playwright’s name.
But starting June 14 with a Silk Road Chicago premiere of Yellow Face and June 18 with a Goodman Theatre world premiere of Chinglish, Hwang offers audiences a double chance to see how circumstances can take strange, often humorous twists due to cultural preconceptions, misconceiptions and differences.
Silk Road Theatre Project, an organization that produces plays with Asian, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern themes, had planned to do Yellow Face earlier in the season but delayed the show when learning that Goodman would do Chinglish late in the 2010-2011 season, according to Yellow Face director, Steve Scott.
“You can call it a ‘Hwang Festival,’ said Scott.
In Yellow Face, a partially autobiographical behind-the-scenes play within a play, Hwang, portrayed by actor David Rhee, wants to cast an Asian in the lead role of his new “Face Value” play.
The casting challenge becomes weird and funny when attempts to be politically correct and abide by union rules mean skirting direct questions of ancestry. The plot turns views of cultural identity upside down when the person casted turns out not to be Asian. More complications arise as events outside “Face Value” impact the players.
As Hwang peels back each layer in “Face Value” and therefore in Yellowface, the issue becomes one of identity and how some people define it by race or ethnicity.
“You have to have a larger understanding of what identity means and not get caught up in one definition of who someone is,” said Scott. “If someone wants to be something, the premise in America is that the person can.”
Given the interesting premise, the question becomes how Scott found the right look for the lead in “Face Value?”
“The trick is in the casting,” he said. “We wanted someone who could be part Asian but neutral enough for people not to be sure. We looked a long time for the right actor. We cast Clayton Stamper as the person who gets the role.”
Scott thinks the play might change how some people view identity. “Hopefully, it will make people think about what Americans are and how - who Americans are - are changing.”