Yellow Face
Kings Cross Theatre, April 28
★★★★½
On stage right now in the tiny Kings Cross Theatre is a small but significant revelation.
Dinosaurus Productions and bAKEHOUSE Theatre Company are staging the remarkably assured, deliciously complex Australian premiere of Yellow Face. While independent works are often charmingly rough around the edges, there is nothing shabby here. In a consistently funny but deeply thoughtful production, the play comes to playful, acerbic, and sometimes poignant life.
Helen Kim in Yellow Face, which packs an emotional punch that belies its modest setting.Credit:Clare Hawley
Written by David Henry Hwang, we follow a fictionalised version of the playwright – DHH (the brilliant Shan-Ree Tan). After a very public attempt to ensure a Broadway production of Miss Saigon is authentically cast, DHH mistakenly hires a white actor (Adam Marks, a superbly frustrating portrait of white privilege with puppy-dog eyes) to play the Asian lead in his next play.
What follows is a study of racism against Asian-Americans, geopolitical intrigue, performative wokeness and thorny questions about public and personal narratives. Who do we serve when we speak out about injustice? What happens when our political outrage is personally motivated? What happens when we rip past politeness to get to the heart of the matter?
The company has thoroughly considered these questions and tackles them with disarming, open-hearted gutsiness. Comedy built on consciousness. Ruru Zhu’s production design creates a movable playing space with simple red boxes that become part of the choreography, as though it’s the play’s beating heart. Lucia Haddad lights the action with a sly and conspiratorial hand.
Tan as DHH is our still point, the constant and the soul. He is vulnerable, smartly nuanced, and wickedly funny; he holds the audience in the palm of his hands. He looks at us wryly, and we are complicit in the action.
The brilliant ensemble cast – Jonathan Chan, Helen Kim, Kian Pitman, Whitney Richards and Idam Sondhi – play a variety of roles from Jane Krakowski and B.D Wong to a shark-like journalist Despite a few stumbles over lines, these performances are each fully realised and comfortably worn.
Directed by Tasnim Hossain – who with this production demonstrates she is a fine interpreter of text, a deft hand at multi-layered storytelling, and in possession of a natural wit that both supports and elevates the comedy in the play. There can be no doubt that we are watching a major directing talent at work. The entire company is on fire. See it.
April 29, 2021 at 10:32AM
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Don’t miss this funny, thoughtful show - Sydney Morning Herald
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Funny
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