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Using the stage to highlight roles of race and ethnicity

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP

New York

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At the age of 22, David Henry Hwang's debut play Fresh Off the Boat opened at the Public Theatre in the East Village and gained him acclaim from audiences and critics.

He told The New York Times: 'I write plays to claim a place for Asian-Americans' - a quote that became the headline for his profile in the newspaper.

Hwang quickly became a rising star on Broadway, best known for the Tony award-winning M. Butterfly, and became a role model for Asian-Americans and sometimes an advocate for the community. He was heavily involved in protests when the British hit Miss Saigon came to Broadway in 1991 with Caucasian Jonathan Pryce playing the Eurasian lead.

But yesterday, when Hwang's latest play, Yellow Face, opened in the same theatre for its New York premiere, his views on race had clearly changed. 'At 22, I was a kind of an ethnic figure and that was very meaningful to me at the time and as I have grown older I think it's less meaningful,' Hwang, now 50, said.

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He analysed the personal transformation in the play, which is largely based on real stories - the protagonist is a playwright called Hwang and the names of supporting roles are all known figures in the Chinese community. The show starts with the Miss Saigon protests and switches to a later incident when the playwright picked a white actor to play an Asian role in one of his own plays by mistake. Hwang lost the respect of the community but the white actor became a spokesman for the Asian community.

By mocking overzealous advocates and recasting real-life bias cases, the play asks many more questions than it provides answers. When it is getting harder to figure out people's race only by the colour of their skin or even their last name, does face still matter? If not, then what is our identity?

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