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Video: Meet the Cast of YELLOW FACE on Broadway
Sep 3, 2024
David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face is back this season, courtesy of Roundabout Theatre Company, and this time, it's on Broadway! The play makes its debut 17 years after its off-Broadway premiere- both iterations with Leigh Silverman at the helm. In this video, watch as the whole company pauses from rehearsals to meet the press ahead of the start of previews.
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Hello, I'm Richard Ridge for Broadway World
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Up next for Roundabout Theatre Company is Yellowface by Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Wang
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Under the direction of Lee Silverman, it welcomes back to Broadway, Daniel Day Kim
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and I caught up with the company during a break in rehearsal. Welcome back to Broadway, or welcome home, I should say
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How does it feel? It feels really good. It does feel like coming home a little bit
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And, you know, it's also new for me because the last time I was here, I wasn't in the
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theater district. I was at Lincoln Center. So to be in the heart of everything is really special
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I really have enjoyed the process. To be able to sit down around the table with some very smart
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funny, creative people and just work a play out together. It's a real treat. It really feels like a
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community and an ensemble, especially with someone like Lee Silverman leading us. Yeah
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So what's it like having David in the room, you know, making revisions and rewriting
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I was saying it's the best of all possible worlds because so I often when we work on a play, we're working with a playwright who's no longer with us. And so
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the play, the written word becomes canon and you can't make any changes. Or you're working on a
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new play where you're getting script revisions every day and you don't really know what your
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play is until the day you hit your opening night. But here, we have the benefit of having a play that's
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been produced. So we know it works already. But we also had the playwright in the room to help refine
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and tweak and and give thoughts on the current production. So it's been a real blessing that way
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I mean, it's very gratifying. We did this play in 07 off We thought or I thought oh this is a comedy for you know mostly be for Asian audiences and it very gratifying that over the years it grown in stature
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it's been done around, and the culture has moved, too. So when we did a reading of the version for Audible, we discovered last year, we discovered
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oh, it's even funnier now, because the issues that are at the heart of it, the power
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the comedy are so much more central to our culture. So it's really exciting to now be getting to do this
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on Broadway for, you know, a mainstream theater audience. I mean, this play does so many incredibly
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smart things. It starts as this raucous comedy and it ends up this very heartfelt personal play
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And to be able to bring people on a theatrical journey like that, to give them the opportunity
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to laugh and really think and reconsider things. I mean, and it feels like that's certainly
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why I get up in the morning. It's like who can we bring to the theater who hasn't been there
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before, who can have an live experience that they can't have on their phone or in front of
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their television or their computer screen. You know, that's what gets me going in the morning
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Like, who do we bring in? How do we get them there? How do we make it accessible to them? How do we make it
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interesting to them? How do we compel people to the theater? That's really the question, I think
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that we are facing as theater makers right now. What a way to make your Broadway debut
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Yeah, it is. And David Henry Gwanclay, it's incredible. When I read it, I laughed a lot and I was touched as well, and it made me think and I thought
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this is a conversation that should be had. I play Marcus, who is an actor who is cast by DHS
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Daniel character who was based on David the playwright himself who I cast in his play and mistaken for Asian And then we go down the rabbit hole of a lot of confusion and mix and humor
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And it's really fun. I mean, it starts in this very funny place of kind of laughing at about these themes
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but by the end, they're really embodied. I cannot tell you how excited I am
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I've been waiting for this for 17 years. I mean, this play, it won the OB, it was the finals for the Pulitzer
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and I thought back then in 2007 that it was a brilliant play that should be on Broadway
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and reach a wider audience, and I'm just happy that it finally has gotten here
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I knew of the play. I had not read or seen the play, and I didn't realize how funny it was
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that it's just like a huge, gaffawing comedy. It makes it all the more interesting that it's mostly true
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And the fun that David makes of himself is so endearing. It's like, you know, before there was David Brent or Larry David, you know
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looking like a jerk on curfewan enthusiasm, David Henry Huan was doing it in Yellowface
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It's such a gift to have, you know, the playwright in the room
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because so many times we do plays that the playwrights are no longer with us. So to have him in the room and doing revisions on the spot is such a gift and to be able to ask him questions of like, did that actually happen to you
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And for him to be like yes and it just deepens the story It deepens the characters And for you know to make really really significant revisions you know considering the cast that he has now Yeah it such a gift I hope that when people leave the show it forces them to sort of look around at the world as it is now
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Because one of the comical arguments that's being made is like, this character is mixed race
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Or this actor is mixed race. He can play any of these parts
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And obviously that's not actually the case. but I think it is interesting in the way that the world is now with casting questions
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because the world is getting more multicultural. And a lot of people are hopper or mixed race or biracial
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So what, how can we like expand our world to include everybody
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I think it's going to start a lot of conversations. You know, when I first looked at the script, I thought
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oh, is this going to be kind of lecturing and sort of, you know, a kind of preaching
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And of course, right away, you're like, no, this is hilarious and very funny and very self-effacing
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And it kind of disarms you right away. And in that disarming, it kind of opens you to being able to talk about these really hot-button issues
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and discuss them in a really, really palatable way. And so I think the audiences will come away with this kind of feeling of like
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Oh, there's a complex nature to the themes in this show. And we can discuss them because we've been sort of, the door has been open to that
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So I feel like it's going to allow people to see things in a different way
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And that's always the goal
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