Yellow Face

COLOR ME SHOCKED Lee, left, accuses Bean of race-insensitivity.

Photograph: Joan Marcus

The opening moment of David Henry Hwang’s clever comedy , Yellow Face is insanely gutsy: It’s intentionally cringe-inducing. Primed for a piece on racial identity (we’ve parsed the title and the playwright), the audience feels its collective heart sink as a character named David Henry Hwang (Hoon Lee) receives mealymouthed e-mails from a globe-trotting pal, Marcus (Noah Bean). “The Dong have a saying, ‘Rice feeds the body, but song feeds the heart.’ ” We sigh. It’s going to be like that? Only as the piece finishes do we see how Hwang has kept his irony in reserve—the sincerest avowals of identity are actually rimshots, in retrospect.

On a simple platform, the lightly fictionalized Hwang tells us some horror stories from his past. With the self-deprecation knob at 11, he discusses the early ’90s Miss Saigon fracas, in which he took the lead in decrying Jonathan Pryce’s race-inappropriate casting (true!) and his own actor-related hiccups for the unfortunate flop Face Value (not as true!). Did he really try to pass off his white lead as a Siberian Jew? Nyet. But Hwang uses his imaginary bumbling as a springboard for discussing actual American fumbles, like our whoops-a-daisy moment with maligned physicist Wen Ho Lee.

Hwang keeps these bigger-picture issues for the second act, which moves with greater economy than the first. But when the astonishing Francis Jue melts down as Hwang’s disillusioned father and Anthony Torn shambles menacingly on as a New York Times reporter with bared fangs, any sins from the first hour vanish.

—Helen Shaw