Playing the character of “DHH,” the actor Daniel Dae Kim begins “ Yellow Face ,” the new production of David Henry Hwang ’s play, standing within a box, from which he promptly strides out. It’s a crisp and clear visual metaphor in a production hardly short on them (the two onstage boxes rotate to conjure the various locations DHH recollects over the course of the play). And it’s a statement of intent, too.
“Yellow Face,” produced on Broadway for the first time after an initial Off Broadway run in 2007, might be the prolific Hwang’s magnum opus, but it’s also wily, wry, and slippery. It resists classification practically to its final moments, even as it builds to a climax of startling power. Here, Kim — an actor likely best known for TV’s “Lost” — narrates his character’s recollections of a turbulent time in his artistic and personal life; the play chronicles DHH’s unpleasant experience of serving as a voice on a political issue whose complexities seem to evade his grasp.
Complexity is nothing new for Hwang, or for the character of DHH, who is-and-is-not Hwang himself. Kim beams winningly as he recounts a career high point, after the success of his play “M. Butterfly.
” That work is internecine, designed both as a retelling of a real-life sex scandal involving a French diplomat and a Chinese spy but also as a critique of stories Westerners tell about Asia, like the opera “Madame Butterfly.” But it found a major audience — earning a .