Yellow Face

Photo/Joan Marcus

Is David Henry Hwang capable of writing about anything other than himself? Sure, but you wouldn't be able to tell from Yellow Face, his indulgent, albeit occasionally powerful, autobifictionalography (a term stolen from comic writer Lynda Barry). It's a one-person show about DHH (Hoon Lee) starring other characters (like Lisa Kron's Well, also directed by Leigh Silverman). It's also an apology for his Broadway flop, Face Value, a farce written in response to the controversial casting of Jonathan Pryce in Miss Saigon, which Mr. Hwang uses within his play to launch a new contrivance: his desperate, accidental casting of an American, Marcus G. Dahlman (Noah Bean), as the Asian lead of Face Value.

To avoid embarrassment, DHH covers for his actor, reshaping him as "Marcus Gee," a Siberian Jew (that's Eurasian to you!), only to grow jealous -- and offended -- when Marcus replaces him as the theater's Asian-American spokesperson. It would be delightfully self-deprecating, except it's not Mr. Hwang up there, it's Hoon Lee, and no matter how talented Mr. Lee is (and he is very, very talented), the "self-deprecation" misses, as do many of the ensemble's characterizations (B. D. Wong, good; Michael Riedel, bad; Jane Krakowski, awful). The play becomes a device for Mr. Hwang to hide behind, and as a result, the rage that he channels -- perhaps rightfully so -- at [Name Withheld On Advice of Counsel], a passively antagonistic New York Times reporter, doesn't connect on an emotional level. It becomes rhetoric, dictated in a sleek and distantly narrated framework. It's Extras without Ricky Gervais; there's a whole level of self-satire and awkward humor that just doesn't work.

That said, Yellow Face is a satisfyingly intellectual work, though those who disliked the superior (though less personal) The Farnsworth Invention will surely hate this play, too. Mrs. Silverman handles the meta-fiction well by removing any outside stimuli: the set is a slightly raised platform surrounded by several chairs (for idle actors) and three blank brick walls. The only props are radio microphones that swing down from above for the all-too-common montages of quotes (for despite -- or perhaps because of -- Mr. Hwang's fabrications, he's forced to clearly block out what is quantifiably true). The show only pauses when DHH is talking to his father, HYH (Francis Jue), and that's simply because HYH's endearing humor is in his slow persistence.

Yellow Face is an intriguing work, but David Henry Hwang set out to find a face and wound up extending his farce. The play has a mask up, a highly expressive one named Hoon Lee, but it prevents the work from being personal, and while it makes us think of artistic freedom and race, it does not make us feel for that struggle.

PLAY: "The Children of Vonderly"

Photo/Matt Zugale

The Children of Vonderly is a delightfully full new play from Lloyd Suh that is, more than anything else, playful. Keeping in tone with the upbeat eccentrics of the Vonderly household, Suh redefines normality in every inch of his script, from "anti-semantic" jokes to quirky dismissals of religion and sassy wordplay ("a motherfucker's fucking mother"). Even the few moments that are more repetitious than paralleled are enjoyable: closer to sports replay than sitcom rehash.

The play opens on the seventh and last day of Shiva, the Jewish period of mourning (in this case for the Vonderly's adopting father), a period that has only "amplified the weird." Jerry (William Jackson Harper) carts himself around in a wheelchair and yarmulke, trying to take care of his sweet but mentally-stunted sister, Sasha (Jackie Chung) and his shy, mountainous brother, Abraham (Shawn Randall). Unfortunately for him, it's his grief-stricken mother, Norma (Lynn Cohen), whom he ought to worry for, and after her prolonged, opera-worthy histrionics ("You stupid ingrates, I love you"), another of his adopted brothers, Benjamin (Stephen Jutras), decides to have her committed. Jerry's world, already fragile enough thanks to the glass house set design by Sarah Lambert, grows even shakier when his other siblings, bumbling Noah and weak-boned Georgia (Hoon Lee and Maureen Sebastian), announce their plans to elope. But wait, there's more: as Jerry loses himself in drink, mourning his own realized dreams for traveling with Georgia, Benjamin asserts himself again, hiring a supervisor, Chuck (Paco Tolson), to watch over the house.

For all that plot, the play runs remarkably smooth, and without any degeneration into farce. Instead, it's a comic drama that comes closer to identifying what truly makes a family than most plays I've seen this year. Credit where due to director Ralph B. Pena, who gracefully livens the interludes with breezy music and short, silent essences of scenes in the background (a picnic, a basketball game). The show is also grounded in the phenomenal casting, which keeps the characters from sliding into caricature or stereotype. They're funny, but they're not being handled with kid gloves, and their emotions (the chest-thumping "I love you") are pure.

The Children of Vonderly covers a lot of ground, and everyone involved in this outstanding production keeps up the pace. Ms. Cohen, in her few scenes, manages to be domineering, fragile, and then sweet; Mr. Lee swings from passionate to lost to weepy and back again; and Mr. Harper, stuck playing the stubbornest of the bunch, still manages to make his repetitious arguments sound new, as if he were a Rumpelstiltskin of words, spinning them into gold.

I Can't Believe It's Not Butter might want to tie an ad campaign in with this Ma-Yi production: for a show more than two hours long, it's remarkably spry and effortlessly involved. Not for lack of a better word, but because it's the right word: The Children of Vonderly is fun.