Leigh Silverman is the director of the new play by David Henry Hwang which recently premiered at the Public Theatre. The play, Yellow Face is a look around the issues of color blind casting, and Leigh talked with Broadway Bullet about all these issues as well as how she broke into the directing field.
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Broadway Bullet Interview:
Broadway Bullet: Anybody who remembers the opening of Miss Saigon in the early '90s should remember a lot of hullabaloo surrounding the casting issues. Playwright David Henry Hwang led the protests and now, in a turn of events that should appeal not only to fans of musical theater but straight plays and, I think, all sorts of artists, the Public Theater is presenting David Henry Hwang's new work Yellow Face and we have director Leigh Silverman here in the studio with us. How are you doing, Leigh?
Leigh Silverman: Hi! Great, thanks.
BB: So I just gave the very soft encapsulation of this whole event, but there's a lot to talk about here, with all the casting and colorblind issues leading into this play. And maybe it's best to start at the beginning, with the catalyst of the whole event, with Miss Saigon.
LS: Sure. I think that something that David's been interested in exploring since the Miss Saigon issue is what would make a race farce? You have gender farces, you know, in Shakespeare – there's many of them. But what would be a race farce? How could you do that? And so, he uses throughout the whole play of Yellow Face, a series of very personal, autobiographical events, starting with the Miss Saigon protest that he led, as a catalyst and a way to explore all these different issues: what is race? What is colorblind casting? What is identity? What does it mean to say – as the character of David Henry Hwang says throughout the play – "I'm an Asian-American role model"? And then he spends the whole play just skewering himself. Part of the thing that makes this play so radical and so fun to work on is that he really takes everything that has become synonymous with his name – you know, political correctness, the idea of being…he calls himself "Captain Asian-America" in the play – and he continually skewers it and has terrific fun with our idea of political correctness. And in a certain way, the play is a radical departure for him, in terms of things he's written before, and I think a very profound, ultimately personal, meaningful search for what makes us the best person that we are. Is it, in fact, what we look like on the outside, or who we may be on the inside?
MG: Now, for those of our listeners who may not remember, maybe you can let us know exactly what the issues were surrounding Miss Saigon.
LS: Sure. The lead character in Miss Saigon is an Asian engineer. It's actually a Eurasian engineer – that's sort of how it's defined. And Jonathan Pryce is… exactly. And that's a part that was played to great acclaim in London, and when Cameron Mackintosh was going to bring the production here to New York, there was an outcry: how could Jonathan Pryce play that part? There was a real sense of… he was taping his eyes up during the production, he was wearing yellowface, and there's a long tradition of that happening here. And it came right on the heels of David winning the Tony Award for M. Butterfly, and there was a hope or a sense from the Asian community that the times would be different here. At least that's what the play kind of posits. And so, the play starts with David winning the Tony Award and then receiving a phone call from B.D. Wong – "David, did you know that Jonathan Pryce is coming here, and is going to be playing this part?" And the character of David Henry Hwang says, "No, no, no, that would never happen here. Yellowface? In this day and age? That's crazy!" And then we just sort of go from there. What happened, of course, is that David petitioned Equity, and then Equity said that they didn't want to let Jonathan Pryce come and play the part, and it became an issue of artistic freedom, and then the factions of Equity – people turned on each other, in a certain way – there was a huge number of people who felt that he should be allowed to play the part, and there was a huge number of people in the theatrical community that felt that we should protest him playing the part, and it was just wildfire. Before you knew it, people like George F. Will, Frank Rich, Ed Koch, the sensation of this issue and should Jonathan Pryce be allowed to play this part became an of-the-moment kind of thing. Everyone was talking about it, it was everywhere, people were taking sides – and David, as the forefront of the protest, ended up looking, in his mind, a little silly. He felt that the artistic freedom issue was an important one and of course Jonathan Pryce was allowed to come and play the part and it was a huge hit and ran for years and made a ton of money.
