An invigorating American play ... a scene from Yellow Face. Photograph: Joan Marcus
Who'd have thought it: scarcely had I arrived in New York at the weekend to find a theatre landscape defined more or less entirely by plays. That's far from the norm in a show biz-obsessed town that, commercially at least, lives for the next big musical and thinks of itself as making room for one, maybe two, straight play hits a season - as often as not imports from London.
In fact, while the current season on Broadway and off includes the customary quota (Conor McPherson's The Seafarer and Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, for starters, with the Fiona Shaw/Deborah Warner Happy Days due at the Brooklyn Academy of Music early next month), American plays and playwrights are having their day, as well. The town is buzzing to Tracy Letts' August: Osage County, a three act, three-hour-and-20-minute play, without stars, currently occupying the capacious Broadway house (the Imperial) that is set to house the American premiere of Billy Elliot: The Musical next autumn.
Off Broadway, a new black box theatre located several floors below street level on West 46th Street is enjoying an extended run of its debut offering, Stephen Karam's Speech and Debate, a play (and production, from Avenue Q director Jason Moore) that makes up in amiability and high spirits what it lacks in resonance and polish. And in a city where the greying of the theatre-going public is of much greater concern than in London, you have to cheer an audience composed largely of that elusive youth market that may like the idea of a play called Rock 'n' Roll until they realise that it comes with three hours of Stoppardian mental pyrotechnics attached.
But it's the controversy that once attended the Broadway casting of a London musical that has made for the most invigorating American play I've encountered in many a parched month: David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face, which has already been extended twice at the Public Theater off Broadway and will now play at least until January 13 2008. Hwang's starting point is the protest that the Tony-winning author of the play M. Butterfly was instrumental in spearheading against the casting of Britain's Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian pimp in the Broadway transfer of Miss Saigon in the early 1990s. The kerfuffle led the musical's London producer Cameron Mackintosh to cancel the show outright before ruffled feathers were eventually soothed and the production opened in New York in triumph, winning Pryce his second Tony Award.
So far, so straightforward, you might think, except that Hwang moves on from a protest in which he was very vocal at the time to ponder questions of racial and cultural identity in a landscape fraught with politically incorrect land mines at every turn. Bravely, the playwright makes himself the central character, as played by the superb Hoon Lee, an act of putative hubris that Hwang is shrewd enough to send up: "I'm a writer, and in the end everything's always about me." In fact, Yellow Face reaches way beyond ostensible narcissism to cast a wounding glance at America's seemingly ceaseless capacity to demonise outsiders - China, we're told, is going to get it once American politicos have dispensed with the Middle East - while functioning equally as a requiem for Hwang's now-deceased father, a cheerfully Sinatra-obsessed banker, played with infectious zeal by Francis Jue, who succumbs to cancer at about the same time that he gives up on his beloved America. (In a play whose characters couple the real with the invented, the audience visibly flinches at the malign presence of senator Fred Thompson, the Tennessean who is now a Republican candidate for the presidency.)
Fleeting comments are heard from Mackintosh while Nicholas Hytner, who directed Miss Saigon, is among those given a special thanks from the dramatist in the show's programme. You get a glimpse into the culture that creates Broadway flops as well as hits (we're offered a synoptic history of Face Value, Hwang's Broadway follow-up to M. Butterfly, which closed in previews), without a trace of theatrical solipsism; instead, in what is easily his finest play since M. Butterfly, Hwang moves on from a bygone theatre industry brouhaha to anatomise the abiding cultural fault lines whereby a country and its people are struggling to know themselves. The beauty of Yellow Face is anything but skin deep.
