Yellow Face

Part biography, part comic fantasy, Yellow Face is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Henry Hwang's sendup of anti Asian stereotypes and the traps he falls into searching for acceptance in a not so colorblind world. The play starts in the 1990s as the fictional DHH is casting Miss Saigon and unwittingly casts a white actor in the role of the engineer. This happens alongside the real-life investigation of Hwang's father, the first Asian American to own a federally chartered bank, and the espionage charges against physicist Wen Ho Lee. Adroitly combining a light touch with weighty political and emotional issues, Hwang creates a "a docu-style comedy recounting a] controversy from his point of view" (Washington Post).