Even in today’s increasingly diverse world of theatre and the arts, finding high-quality and accurate representation of minorities and people of color can be incredibly difficult. The struggles of Asian-Americans, in particular, can be innately difficult to translate accurately to the stage, as they are given a disproportionately small voice in the American arts. However, artists like playwright David Henry Hwang have made tremendous strides in advocating for the voices of Asian-Americans to be heard in the world of theatre, his works (including M. Butterfly, Chinglish and Yellow Face) demonstrating the unique difficulties they have in fighting for their own sense of agency and standing up to those who would wish to marginalize them.
A first-generation Asian-American man, David Henry Hwang’s life experience and background is often the subject of many of his works, many of which deal with majority Asian and Asian-American characters and actors (Boles). Throughout his decades-long career, Hwang has written numerous plays for Asian-American actors and actresses, dealing often with issues relating closely to this community, including racism, prejudice, identity and even gender. Hwang’s breakout work was the 1988 play M. Butterfly, which won the Tony Award for Best Play and is one of the biggest (and most controversial) examples of Asian-American issues being explored in a large-scale Broadway venue (Boles). The tale of Rene Gallimard, a French civil servant living in China, and his relationship with cross-dressing Chinese opera singer Song Liling, Hwang offered a deeply layered, fascinating take on Orientalism and gender stereotypes, exploring in particular the abject, feminized nature of Asian men in Western society. Judging from Song’s ability to play into the Orientalized vision of the submissive Chinese woman to get what he wants from Western colonizers like Rene, he is able to express a measure of power and agency that he would not otherwise have in his marginalized societal role as an Oriental man. As such, Hwang managed to create a high-profile play that allowed Asians to overcome the systems of power that invariably place Western men at the top of the social hierarchy, thus advocating for Asians in a way that had not been seen before.
Hwang has gone on to explore myriad issues of Asian and Asian-American life through his works, even including himself and his own personal experiences into his stories. His 2007 play Yellow Face is a fictionalized, presentational account of the controversy he experienced when casting a white actor in his play Face Value, exploring the kinds of contradictions one experiences as an Asian-American with power and celebrity, and the expectations placed upon you as a perceived leader of your community. Throughout the play, Hwang’s protagonist character explores whether or not it is acceptable for white actors to put on ‘yellow face’ to play Asian characters, as expressed through the deception of a white actor disguising his heritage to play an Asian man in Hwang’s play. Through works like these, Hwang manages to explore complicated issues that are often specific to Asian-Americans, placing them on prominent, high-profile stages for audiences of all backgrounds to see, enjoy and understand.
At the center of Yellow Face’s overall exploration of cultural issues that are important to Asian-Americans, Hwang explores the conflicts that he has himself as an Asian-American man. He is torn between his dedication to his community and his own mainstream success as a playwright, and questions how committed he is to actually standing up for his people’s representation when he equivocates on actually addressing their concerns about race-sensitive casting. Hwang even questions his own authenticity as an Asian man, as he finds himself relating more to white culture than Asian culture, considering himself a ‘yellow face’ of a sort. These issues of race and identity run throughout Yellow Face, and in fact the majority of Hwang’s works: “Years ago, I discovered a face - one I could live better and more fully than anything I’d ever tried. But as the years went by, my face became my mask. And I became just another actor - running around in yellow face” (Hwang 62-63). It is this level of self-reflection that makes David Henry Hwang’s works so vibrant and important for Asian-American representation in theatre.
Works Cited
Boles, William C. Understanding David Henry Hwang. University of South Carolina Press,
2013.
Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. Samuel French, 1988.
Hwang, David Henry. Yellow Face. Samuel French, 2007.
