Yellow Face review: triumph for David Henry Hwang launches London's new Park Theatre

Pic by Simon Annand

My review of Yellow Face in the Morning Star 
4 stars

Tuesday 28 May 2013 by Anna Chen
Yellow Face
Park Theatre, London N4

This smart and savvy comedy delivers a knock-out blow to any still-entrenched belief in certain crepuscular crannies of theatre land that east Asians can't produce culture.

Racism no longer has an outlet in blackface performance but yellowface lingers as a method of corralling an ethnic minority into a ghetto, depriving them of jobs and creative participation.

That's the context of the Obie award-winning Yellow Face, an admittedly autobiographical indulgence by David Henry Hwang which tells a funny and fast-paced story of his perennial war against the surreptitious devices used to keep Asians in their place, in particular the 1990s yellow-peril hysteria targeting President Bill Clinton and threatening to engulf American-Chinese people.

Having burned out as the "poster child for political correctness" in the battle of Miss Saigon - when American-Asian actors protested noisily against white British actor Jonathan Pryce reprising his part as the Asian engineer for the Broadway transfer of the musical - Tony award-winning playwright DHH (Kevin Shen) buckles down to work on his next play Face Value.

He inadvertently casts white actor Marcus G Dahlman (Ben Starr) in the leading Asian role and the subsequent cover-up reveals much more than it conceals.

Too sophisticated to lecture, Hwang skilfully navigates a series of real-life anti-Chinese events including the accusation that his banker father Henry (David Yip) is aiding an enemy - China - and the failed prosecution of Dr Wen Ho Lee as a nuclear spy for Beijing, harking back to the Rosenbergs' execution.

In reversing the situation and trying to manipulate his star Dahlman - "dollman," geddit? - Hwang exposes the absurdity of judging people by their skin.

It's the Siberian Jew Dahlman, building a successful career on an erroneous assumption that he is part Asian, who pleads: "It doesn't matter what someone looks like on the outside."

Hwang has long been respected as a writer of depth with an impressive body of work permeated by a progressive political perspective. In Yellow Face he argues that we should all be part of "the big song" as experienced by Dahlman, who finds peace and an identity with the Dong tribe of China.

Director Alex Sims mounts a technically sharp, elegant and enormously effective minimalist staging in-the-round for an excellent cast who mostly play multiple roles.

Actor-producer Kevin Shen pulls off several firsts with this British premiere of Yellow Face at north London's brand-new Park Theatre.

Following last year's still-rumbling RSC The Orphan Of Zhao controversy, Hwang's long-awaited theatrical resurfacing in Britain after a couple of decades provides a welcome addition to the debate around representation of east Asians in this country's culture.

Runs until June 16. Box office: (020) 7281-8813

See Anna's Morning Star feature on David Henry Hwang

Baby great tit rescued from cat and fed by its mother

Oh, the heartbreak of trying to save a tiny life.

We even named him ... or her. That's how hopeful we were that we could save Cartman the baby great tit. Rescued from the neighbour's cat, Cartman looks robust enough but something's wrong and (s)he can't fly. To save it from cats and foxes, we keep it indoors overnight in a tub with water, small worms and seed but (s)he's too young to feed itself.

Put back out in the garden the next day, Cartman's mother finds and feeds it. This goes on until dusk when we take it back inside.

Sadly, (s)he doesn't survive this second night.

David Henry Hwang comes to London: Yellow Face at the Park Theatre

Anna Chen and David Henry Hwang in the Park Theatre (Thanks to Kathryn Golding for snapping this one)

Anna and Dr Amanda Rogers at Thursday's Yellow Face press night

Amanda and Charles Shaar Murray on press night

Kevin Shen (who plays DHH in Yellow Face) introduces today's Q&A session with David Henry Hwang and Dr Amanda Rogers

Amanda and David in the Yellow Face Q&A

David Henry Hwang

To the spanking new Park Theatre in north London for the British premiere of David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face only 20 years after David's Tony-award winning M Butterfly which starred Anthony Hopkins was a smash hit on Broadway and beyond. (As he wrote one of the few parts for east Asian women, practically all young actresses have played the chilly Comrade Chen in various productions ... including me!)

It's a sparkling stylish comedy, witty, clever and very tightly directed and acted. And it's made a timely appearance in the wake of the RSC The Orphan of Zhao controversy, having something to say about the absurdity of judging human beings by their skin.

Actor Kevin Shen, who produced and stars as the leading character (a certain award-winning playwright called "DHH"), said his production company had offered it to all the theatres who turned it down on the grounds it wasn't "commercial", so thank heavens for the Park Theatre for having the vision to take it on.

My review will be published in the Morning Star on Wednesday. I gave it four stars.

You have until 16th June to catch it.

Review, interview, South China Morning Post column, and video of the Q&A to come ...

Crosstown Lightnin' "Werewolves of London" at the Black Velvet

A culture-rammed week began with Crosstown Lightnin' at the Black Velvet club in West Kensington last Saturday 18th May, supporting Bex Marshall and her band.

Here's Crosstown Lightnin's encore with special guest Stephen Dale Petit. Charles Shaar Murray, Buffalo Bill Smith, Marc Jefferies and Pete Miles play "Werewolves of London" by Warren Zevon.

Video by Anna Chen.

Ellen Gallagher, fat ladies and Pan sex with goat: my week of London kulcher

POMPEII, HERCULANEUM AND ICE AGE ART

In the cultural whirl that's been my life this past week, I've seen not only the sold-out sexily titled Life and Death: Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition (on until 29 September), I also caught Ice Age Art now in its final weeks: both at the British Museum. Some of the ice-age artefacts go back 31,000 years and, as the curators blast out from the posters, it does indeed mark the arrival of the modern mind.

Female forms abound. Closer to Beryl Cook than Vogue, them were the days when being voluptuous (or as we called it in Hackney, "podgy") made you an object of beauty and the muse of artists. I wonder if those cavemen slept with their models.

The funniest exhibit to have survived the volcanic wrath of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 is the statue of Pan shagging a goat — a garden ornament, it is believed, and certainly one I'd have frightening the squirrels in my back yard any day. It's a nanny, not a male goat the god of the wild is penetrating, so, hey, at least Pan's not GAY, thus preserving some decorum for the elderly ladies and school parties clogging up the aisles. However, I bet she's under age, thereby opening up another can of net-curtainland anxieties.

But she looks happy enough, and Pan has the manners to take her missionary stylee rather than doggy, so he's showing respect and not a little affection in the way he's playing with her beard. If a guy tugs fondly at your facial hair while making sweet lurve instead of demanding electrolysis, you know you're in with a second date. Up close enough for my breath to steam up the glass case, the wickedness in his smile is achieved with such subtlety that I could swear he winked at me.

ELLEN GALLAGHER

At Tate Modern, I did one last circuit of the Lichtenstein on its last day, quite liked the Saloua Raouda Choucair but fell head over heels in love with Ellen Gallagher who I'd never even heard of before.

Motifs of boggle eyes and big grinning thick-lipped mouths run through her early work and are immediate clues as to her identity as a mixed-race black woman working in the US. She's funny, beautiful and political so that's my fandom sewn up.

Three vast canvasses made up of hundreds of original mid-20th century newsprint magazine adverts targeting American black people sport new hairdos courtesy of the artist made out of bright yellow plasticene in an amusing and imaginative series of ludicrous formations that aren't half as mad as the neuroses those magazines were feeding.

One of my favourite pictures, Abu Simbel, is a mucked around photogravure of the three giant statues of pharoahs sitting outside one of the pyramids. Again, thick minstrel lips, broad noses and boggle eyes are stuck on the pharoahs' faces. Heads of murdered black men tumble in a heap at the base, two nurses smile and three tiny men in suits point feebly at a flying saucer made of yellow plasticene, turquoise fun-fur and spangles shooting its death rays.

Those nurses are referenced throughout Gallagher's earlier work but it wasn't until I read the notes for another big canvas and my overall favourite, An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity (2008), that I realised the significance.

The experiment referred to is the notorious Tuskegee experiment where hundreds of poor black men were deliberately infected with syphylis and observed over 40 years from 1932 with no medical treatment even when penicillin was found to be a cure. Nurse Eunice Rivers was the trusted intermediary between the men and an insane medical establishment.

This work is an abstract, like several other of the 100 or so works on show, made of hundreds of paper strips soaked in blue ink to varying intensities so that the whole surface ripples, and contrasted with  oranges, ochres and umbers. It is the most beautiful thing to look at yet represents one of the ugliest events in modern American history. The reproductions don't do it justice so do see the real deal.

There's a ton more from Gallagher in the huge AxME restrospective, with her tendrilly marine drawings most notable. Don't miss it.

Coming up, Luke Bedford and the London Sinfonietta, and David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face at London's new Park Theatre.

Crosstown Lightnin' and Bex Marshall at Black Velvet: pix

Crosstown Lightnin' played their first gig in a while, the first of many more the way things are looking.

Charles Shaar Murray, Buffalo Bll Smith, Marc Jefferies and Pete Miles were tight as a gnat's bum and rocked the swanky new W14 venue, Black Velvet, with their punky blues.

Bex Marshall headlined with her 4-piece blues band. She has an amazing textured voice — from gravelly and snarling to sweet and melodic, and she wields a mean resonator. It's an awesome full-blooded BIG sound from a home-grown Brit.

Special mention to her backing singer who gave a soaring gospelled up acapella "New York, New York".

Some pix here. Videos of Crosstown Lightnin' to come.

VIDEO: Bird Call Blues