Story/Teller

Story/Teller Arts: David Henry Hwang on Yellow Face with James Ijames

Wednesday, 7:00 pm EDT October 8, 2025

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

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Tony Award-winning playwright, librettist, and author, David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly, Chinglish), joins us to celebrate the highly anticipated release of Yellow Face, the Broadway Edition.

In this satire-comedy, an Asian American playwright protests yellowface casting in the blockbuster musical Miss Saigon, only to mistakenly cast a white actor as the Asian lead in his own play. This laugh-out-loud, semi-autobiographical work uses Hwang’s lived experience to highlight the complexities of race, while urging the audience to challenge their blind spots. Yellow Face’s ruthless hilarity has made it a hit on and off Broadway for over a decade.

Hwang will be joined in conversation by James Ijames (Fat Ham), Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, director, actor, and educator. Don’t miss this riveting discussion about the art of satire. Hwang will sign books after the event.

Presented in partnership with Theatre Communications Group.

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In Conversation

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    David Henry Hwang

    David Henry Hwang

    David Henry Hwang’s work includes the plays M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, Chinglish, The Dance and the Railroad, and FOB, as well as the musicals Aida, Soft Power, Flower Drum Song and Disney’s Tarzan. Called America’s most-produced living opera librettist, he has written thirteen libretti with composers such as Philip Glass, Osvaldo Golijov, and Huang Ruo. He was also a Writer/Producer for the Golden Globe–winning television series The Affair. Hwang is a Tony Award winner and four-time nominee, a Grammy winner and two-time nominee, a three-time Obie winner, and a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. He was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame and has been honored with the Dramatists Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

  • Ijames-James-Eliana-Cohen-Orth

    James Ijames

    James Ijames

    James Ijames is a playwright, director, actor, and educator. Ijames was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Fat Ham. His other awards include a Pew Fellowship, the F. Otto Haas Award for Emerging Artist, the Terrence McNally New Play Award, a Whiting Award, a Kesselring Prize, and a Steinberg Prize. His other plays include The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington and White. He resides in South Philadelphia.


    Photo Credit: Lowell Thomas

Featured Book

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    Yellow Face

    By David Henry Hwang

    Published by Theatre Communications Group

    PURCHASE

    Part biography, part comic fantasy, Yellow Face is David Henry Hwang’s sendup of anti-Asian stereotypes and the traps he falls into searching for acceptance in a not-so-colorblind world.

    The play starts in the 1990s as the fictional DHH is casting Miss Saigon and unwittingly casts a white actor in the role of the engineer. This happens alongside the real-life investigation of Hwang’s father, the first Asian American to own a federally chartered bank, and the espionage charges against physicist Wen Ho Lee. Adroitly combining a light touch with weighty political and emotional issues, Hwang creates a “a docu-style comedy recounting [a] controversy from his point of view” (Washington Post). This Broadway Edition includes updates and reflections thatbring new urgency to a landmark work, adeptly balancing the comedy and seriousness of the stories portrayed. Having originally debuted Off-Broadway in 2007, the core takeaway is this: Yellow Face remains as poignant as ever.

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About this series

Story/Teller

Our Story/Teller series features actors reading from new works of fiction to give audiences a taste of the language, characters, and story, followed by moderated conversations with the authors.

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