vip in the city

Yellow Face at The Public

At the Public Theater on Lafayette for a performance of David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face, which recently extended its run until January 13, 2008. The play premiered in 2007 at the Los Angeles Music Center’s Mark Taper Forum as a co-production with East West Players.

The play, which Hwang has called a “mockumentary,” explores themes of race and art, starts off as a semi-autobiography, with a lead character named David Henry Hwang or DHH (wittily portrayed by Hoon Lee), just as he is reaching a high point in his nascent career, having just won the 1988 Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics, and John Gassner awards for his Broadway debut, M. Butterfly. With his new stature as the premier Asian-American playwright, Hwang was in a high profile position to lead the Actors’ Equity union protests against the yellow face casting of Caucasian actor Jonathan Pryce in the 1991 Broadway production of Miss Saigon. Hwang was initially praised by Asian groups for his support, but when Broadway producers refused to mount any Broadway run that did not include Pryce, which would result in the loss of many local jobs, the union backed down and Hwang was ultimately abandoned by the theatrical community. (Pryce, of course, went on to win both the Tony and the Drama Desk awards for his dynamic portrayal of a Eurasian pimp.)

From that point, the events turn to farce as fact blends with fiction. A stung Hwang tries to move on with his life and return to writing. Cruel irony builds when the playwright mistakenly casts a white actor named Marcus G. Dahlman (a charismatic Noah Bean) as an Asian-American in his M. Butterfly follow-up Face Value, believing the young man to be Eurasian. When Hwang discovers his error, he must go to great efforts to stretch the definition of what it means to be “Asian” – hence, a young man whose father was a Russian “Siberian” Jew, could perhaps, technically, almost be considered “Asian.” (To further bolster his position among a group of activists, Hwang produces a map showing Siberia just north of China, and a magazine cover of Buryat model Irina Pantaeva.) Dahlman, whose name is now truncated to “Marcus Gee,” goes along with the charade reluctantly at first, but eventually is so touched by how the community supports and embraces him that he comes into his own as a spokesperson for Asian-American actors, with a higher profile even than Hwang himself. Hwang manages to fire Gee – replacing him with the more traditionally Asian actor B.D. Wong — but Face Value famously flops, closing even before its Broadway premiere in 1993, ultimately losing its entire $2 million investment.

When is ethnicity “authentic”? Is identity something that can be adopted? The first half of the play was the comical high point, filled with the playwright’s self-mocking commentary and strewn with theatrical in-jokes; refreshingly, real names are used. (B.D., Jane Krakowski, then-Times theater critic Frank Rich, novelist Gish Jen and mega-producer Cameron Mackintosh are just a few who pass through the stage.)

By the second half, things take a grim and scary turn: the FBI’s investigation against Los Alamos nuclear weapons scientist Wen Ho Lee; the “Donorgate” campaign-contribution probe; the Senate investigation of the Chinese government’s transactions with Chinese-American banks, which implicated Hwang’s father Henry Y. Hwang (played with quiet dignity by Francis Jue) founder of the first Asian-American-owned federally chartered bank in the continental United States. (Although the Far East National Bank was a target of those investigations, no formal charges were ever brought against the elder Hwang, but the disillusionment of his American dream is one of the real tragedies of the play.) Things take on an even more sinister bent when a racial stereotyping New York Times reporter referred to as NWOAOC (“Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel”) tries to manipulate DHH (who once sat on the board of the FENB) into deflecting blame by betraying his father, and raising questions about whether there is any inherent paradox in the term “Chinese-American.”

In the end, there are no neat conclusions. A thought-provoking evening of theater, and a “lively, messy and provocative cultural self-portrait of a play.”

Tags: Asian, David Henry Hwang, theatre, Yellow Face

New Jerusalem at the Classic Stage Company

At the Classic Stage Company on East 13th Street tonight for the first preview of David Ives’ play, New Jerusalem, which will run through February 3, 2008. The playwright has had an eventful 2007; in addition to staging this debut, Ives wrote his third young adult novel and is currently collecting accolades for his Broadway adaptation of Mark Twain’s previously unproduced 1898 play, Is He Dead?

For his latest work, Ives focuses on the events of July 27, 1656 when a 23-year old Baruch (“Bento”) de Spinoza, was summoned to the Talmud Torah Congregation in Amsterdam to be interrogated for his espousal of positions contrary to Jewish belief. At the convocation of his temple board, a proclamation of kherem (excommunication) was imposed against Spinoza, permanently banishing him from all interactions with people of his faith, and sending the young man into spiritual exile. The historical drama is somewhat of a departure from Ives’s typical comedic one-acts, but raises questions perhaps inspired by his own orthodox Polish-Catholic upbringing, and subsequent training at an all-boys Catholic seminary.

Fortunately for Ives’s creative process, very little is known of Spinoza’s life: a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish origin, Spinoza lived a brief and modest life as a lens grinder, displaying a general indifference to fortune, fame and positions of power. The majority of his philosophical works were published posthumously, at the expense of an anonymous donor, including his master work, Ethics, in 1677. Spinoza is generally considered among the most significant of the post-Cartesian philosophers; his rationalism laid the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism, and he claims Goethe, Hegel and Albert Einstein among those influenced by his views on God and Nature.

Ives’s account of Spinoza’s interrogation plays like a philosophy lesson. As the main tenets of Ethics are formulated and expositioned — rather more briskly than I recall from my forays into Spinoza’s writings at college — the ideas started filling in: the systematic, almost mathematical, attempt to probe the identity of God with Nature, the inseparable relationship between mind and body, the concepts of freedom, causality and predetermination.

Award-winning actor Richard Easton plays the chief rabbi of Amsterdam and Spinoza’s pained mentor in a heralded return to the stage after his appearance in Tom Stoppard’s epic Tony-winning period trilogy, The Coast of Utopia at Lincoln Center last season. Also featured in the cast are television veterans Fyvush Finkel (Picket Fences, Boston Public) and David Garrison (Married with Children), and Jenn Harris (offering hammy, comic relief as Spinoza’s half-sister Rebekah), Michael Izquierdo and Natalia Payne.

But New Jerusalem really is Spinoza’s show, and Jeremy Strong (last seen on stage at MTC’s Defiance in 2006) commanded our rapt attention as the sensitive, but passionate persecuted philosopher, holding center stage for almost the entire play, including through intermission.

The Devil’s Disciple

At the Irish Repertory Theatre tonight for The Devil’s Disciple, the first of George Bernard Shaw’s Plays for Puritans (1901) and his only full-length play set in America.  The Revolutionary War-era comedy is the story of rascal Dick Dudgeon, a renegade at odds with his strict, religious society.  As usual, Shaw’s acerbic wit shines in its skewering of self-important piety and political conceit.

Lorenzo Pisoni was all rakish charm in the lead role, gleefully tweaking the establishment, while proving himself in action to be as moral a character as any.

Glowing reviews all around, and a well deserved extended run.

Tags: George Bernard Shaw, Irish Repertory Theatre, plays, theatre