What do Luise Rainer, Linda Hunt and Jonathan Pryce have in common? They won major awards for yellow face. Rainer and Hunt won Oscars. Pryce won both an Olivier and a Tony. If you were around in the 1990s, you might be familiar with the controversy over Pryce’s casting when the musical “Miss Saigon” transferred to Broadway from London’s West End. Among the high profile voices raised in protest was the first Asian American to win a Tony Award for Best Play: Los Angeles-born David Henry Hwang. In the semi-autobiographical play, “Yellow Face,” takes the issues of race, yellow face and how Chinese Americans are treated in the US. Although first produced in 2007, Great Performances on PBS features Daniel Dae Kim in the Broadway revival.
So great was that performance, Kim became the first Asian American to be nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. The play, like Hwang, has California roots.
For those unfamiliar with yellow face or the actors who wore it for a win, here’s what you need to know. German-born Jewish Rainer (12 January 1910-30 December 2014) won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as O-Lan in the 1937 “The Good Earth.” The Ukrainian-born Jewish actor Paul Muni played her husband, Wang Lung. Pearl S. Buck (26 June 1892-6 March 1973), the daughter of Christian missionaries who was raised in China (1892-1934) from the age of four, wrote a best-selling novel “The Good Earth” about the rise of a peasant in China in 1931 and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and in 1938, became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature.
The New Jersey-born Hunt, who was diagnosed with hypopituitary dwarfism, won an Oscar ( Best Supporting Actress) portraying a Eurasian man, Billy Kwan, in the 1982 “The Year of Living Dangerously.” She is not Eurasian.
Welsh Jonathan Pryce won a 1991 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his performance as the Engineer in “Miss Saigon.” Lea Salonga who played a Vietnamese is herself Eurasian, Filipino and Prussian.
Just imagine the furor if a Welsh person or someone considered White had played a person who was supposed to be Black in the 1980s or the 1990s.
David Henry Hwang’s “Yellow Face” tackles the controversy around Pryce’s portrayal of a Eurasian and the play which premiered in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum in association with East West Players in May 2007, was on Broadway last year (September to November) at the Roundabout Theatre Company. In the play Hwang’s alter ego, DHH, appears (Daniel Dae Kim) as an unreliable narrator about the events surrounding the “Miss Saigon” controversy as well as his failed play, “Face Value,” but the play also includes conversations with DHH’s father, HYH (Tzi Ma in Los Angeles’s Mark Taper and Francis Jue off-Broadway and for this Broadway PBS Great Performances) and touches on the congressional probes that seem to have unfairly targeted Chinese Americans in banking (his father) and scientists (Wen Ho Lee). HYH founded the first federally chartered Asian American bank in the Southern California, Far East National Bank, but Senator Fred Thompson (19 August 1942-1 November 2015), who was the chairman of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs (1997-2002), led the investigation into a fundraising controversy. Thompson, who was also at times an actor (see notes below), believed that HYH and others connected to the bank were using money from China to buy influence in US politics through political campaign contributions.
- The Facts in the Fiction (Roundabout Theatre’s Guide to “Yellow Face”
-
Drop Dead Fred: Why Republicans Once Hated Thompson (21 December 2007)
Was all the angst and anger worthwhile?
As Edward Gerjuoy, a professor of physics emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh and who had been a practicing lawyer, wrot about Wen Ho Lee:
By September 13, 2000 the evidence had completely collapsed. On that date the government agreed to a settlement whereby, in return for Lee pleading guilty to a single count of the original 59, he immediately was freed on a sentence of “time served” and all the other counts were dismissed. Presiding Federal District Court Judge James A. Parker told Lee in open court, “I sincerely apologize to you, Dr. Lee, for the unfair manner [in which] you were held in custody by the executive branch.”
As for the casting of “Miss Saigon,” according to the New York Times:
“Miss Saigon” opened in London in 1989, with an acclaimed white British actor, Jonathan Pryce, wearing prosthetics to alter the shape of his eyes and makeup to alter the color of his skin as he played the show’s leading man, a scheming Eurasian pimp called the Engineer. But by the time the show reached Broadway in 1991, Mr. Pryce had abandoned those practices, and, after he won a Tony Award and left the show, the producers changed their approach — in the years since, they have chosen only actors of Asian heritage to play the Engineer, both on Broadway and on the United States tours.
The approach of Broadway and the TV and film industry toward yellow face, particularly at a time when blackface is no longer acceptable should indicate that the binary emphasis of Black and White in diversity talks needs to be reconsidered. Even after the “Miss Saigon” controversy, there was yellow face in films, like the 2012 “Cloud Atlas,” but no blackface.
The pandemic also raised issues of East Asian Americans being forever foreigners. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ma was the victim of a hate crime.
Some things have changed, some things have not.
Hwang’s play premiered in 2007, but a few short years later, Chinese Americans were again targeted. In director Steve James’ 2017 “Abacus: Small Enough to Jail” we see that the problems faced on the East Coast that seem to echo what Hwang’s father confronted. In 2009, a small Chinese American family-run bank in New York City’s Chinatown, Abacus Federal Savings Bank fired a loan officer and reported the fraud to the regulators. A little over two years later, the bank was accused of mortgage fraud by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. The Sung family and 19 of the bank’s former employees were charged. Twelve of the accused who refused to plead guilty were handcuffed to each other and taken down the courthouse hallways. Abacus Federal Savings was the only US bank prosecuted in relations to the financial collapse and the first bank indicted in New York since 1991.
It’s good to remember that both the documentary “Abacus: Small Enough to Jail” (“Frontline”) and “Yellow Face” (“Great Performances”) were both made available on PBS. PBS (and NPR) are currently under threat by the current presidential administration.
Renee Tajima-Peña and Christine Choy’s 1982 documentary “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” also aired on PBS (POV). Without PBS, who will tell the story of Asian Americans?
“Great Performances: Yellow Face” (Season 52, Episode 16) premiered on PBS on 16 May 2025 . Filmed in November 2024 under the direction of Leigh Silverman, “Yellow Face” is currently streaming on PBS. The Broadway production of “Yellow Face is nominated for a 2025 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play. Kim is nominated for Best Actor and Jue is nominated for Best Featured Actor. Jue has already won the Outstanding Featured Performer on a Broadway Play from the Outer Critics Circle Awards. Cynthia Erivo hosts the 78th AnnualTony Awards which will be broadcast live on Sunday, 8 June 2025 on CBS and stream on Paramount+.
NOTA BENE
H.B. Warner played an ancient Chinese man (Chang) and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Aline MacMahon was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for “Dragon Seed.” Danish American actress Gale Songergaard was nominated for Best Supporting Actress as Lady Thiang for “Anna and the King of Siam” (1946).
Jennifer Jones played a Eurasian doctor in “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing” (1955) and received a Best Actress i Oscar nomination.
Fred Thompson played Manhattan District Attorney Arthur Branch on NBC’s “Law & Order” series (116 episodes of “Law & Order” between 2002-2005, but also appeared 11 episodes of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” one episode of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” and all 13 episodes of “Law & Order: Trial by Jury”). Thompson had worked as an assistant to the US Attorney from 1969-1972.
Age of the Geek 