Of racism and family

The theater world is deep in conversation about the announcement of Andrew Barth Feldman to replace Darren Criss in Maybe Happy Ending. The musical, which is about two lifelike "helper bots," is set in Korea and the producers leaned into the Asian background of the show during their Tony campaign. The two leads in the show, Criss and Helen Shen, are both Asian; Criss's standby is also Asian. Andrew Barth Feldman is not.

I am not Asian; I have not seen Maybe Happy Ending, though I have heard good things about it and will undoubtedly see it when it tours. I do think the conversation is interesting, and I understand the arguments on both sides; I just hope it doesn't wind up hurting the show itself.

It did make me think of the play Yellow Face, by David Henry Hwang, which I recently watched on PBS (and which is not related to the novel by R.F. Kuang). That play uses another casting controversy as its springboard, when Jonathan Pryce was cast as the Engineer in Miss Saigon, in both the original West End and Broadway productions. The Engineer is half-French, half-Vietnamese; Pryce is neither. Yellow Face is about Hwang writing and putting on a play, Face Value, about the controversy--it's a farce (the character DHH winds up hiring a white actor to play an Asian character in Face Value), but it's very much about race and politics and family and how they all intertwine.

I also saw DHH's Soft Power at Signature Theatre last year, in which he also has himself as a character; DHH was stabbed, and he incorporates that into the musical, which is largely about a Chinese producer wanting to put on a show to make people in the U.S. like China more. Hillary Clinton is a character and it was both incredibly upsetting but also somewhat cathartic to have seen that in the months leading up to the 2024 election.

What really got me about Yellow Face, and what has stuck with me since I watched it, is the attitude of the character of DHH's father. He's an immigrant who has built a bank and he fits the stereotype of the ultra-patriotic American immigrant. His faith in his son, his faith in his adopted country, his faith in his ability to bootstrap himself to success are what have been running through my mind.

Daniel Dae Kim in Yellow Face. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Similarly, I walked away from Soft Power thinking of how images have power, and how American exceptionalism can affect everyone. The rise of anti-Asian hate crimes in the wake of covid (though the actual event that inspired the play, and the play itself, are both set in 2016) and whether that affects the electorate in a meaningful way--and what it means to the rest of the world, watching.

I also recently read All That's Left Unsaid, by Tracey Lien, about an Australian-Vietnamese woman looking into the murder of her brother. It's really an exploration of generational trauma, the lives of immigrants and refugees, and the friendships and familial relationships that exist in those circumstances. We get to hear from the people who fled Vietnam, their kids (some of whom were born in refugee camps, others born before--or after--their immigration), people who interacted with them all. It's a perspective on Vietnam-era refugees that I wasn't at all familiar with; being in the U.S., most of what we hear about is the U.S., but it makes perfect sense that a lot of southeast Asians would flee to Australia.

Ky's relationship with her best friend Minnie is at the center of the story. Ky is more a straight-and-narrow kid, wanting to do well at school and please her parents and behave. Minnie questions everything and everyone, in a way that I found both admirable and frustrating.

I don't really have anything tying this together, other than the importance of the arts to help people see new perspectives. Whether that's a book or a play, serious or a farce, there's nothing like the arts to make people's worlds larger.