How Daniel Dae Kim Finds the Funny in Broadway’s ‘Yellow Face’
A little-known fact about Daniel Dae Kim: He’s really, really into “Saturday Night Live.”
“I’m a super fan,” says the actor just a few days before starting performances for the revival of David Henry Hwang’s 2007 play “Yellow Face” on Broadway. Speaking on the latest episode of “Stagecraft,” Variety’s theater podcast, he added, “I have not missed a single episode since probably 1980.”
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That trivia tidbit may come as a surprise to those who know Kim best for the super-serious characters he plays on TV, like the loyal survivor Jin-Soo Kwon on “Lost” or the upstanding detective Chin Ho Kelly on “Hawaii Five-0.” But now this “SNL” enthusiast is subverting his own morally upright persona in Hwang’s play, in which he stars as a comically flawed version of the Tony-winning playwright.
Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below:
“Seeing someone like Daniel start to lose it and flounder and act unscrupulously? That’s pretty funny,” Hwang says.
Opening on Broadway Oct. 1, “Yellow Face” is a farcical chronicle of Hwang’s experience leading the 1990 protest against the casting of white actor Jonathan Pryce in a major Eurasian role of “Miss Saigon.” In the play, Kim’s character, DHH, accidentally casts a white actor in an Asian role in “Face Value,” Hwang’s real-life play that flopped on Broadway in 1993.
Although comedy might be a departure for Kim, DHH seems to fall right in the actor’s wheelhouse in other ways. Like Hwang, Kim is a vocal advocate for Asian Americans. He testified before Congress in 2021 about the ongoing wave of anti-Asian hate crimes and won admiration when he and his co-star, Grace Park, walked away from “Hawaii Five-0” after seven seasons over pay disparities with white castmates.
The overlap of DHH’s experiences with his own was part of the appeal for Kim. “When you stick your neck out like that, you feel very vulnerable,” he says. “David shows us the personal part of the journey. You try to be brave about the thing that you’re fighting so hard for, but it doesn’t mean you’re not scared and you don’t question your own decisions.”
He adds, “The play also explores, ‘How much of my ego is driving me to do these things? How much self-gain is there in fighting for the community?’ I give David a lot of credit for asking those questions, because I’ve asked them myself.”
For the theater industry, the Broadway arrival of “Yellow Face” also serves as what Kim calls “a barometer of how far we’ve come,” 30 years after the early-’90s setting of the play and 17 years after the show premiered in L.A.
On one hand, the practice of casting white actors in Asian roles — and modifying their features to look the part — now feels as obviously misguided as blackface. And as Kim is fond of saying, “There’s never been a better time to be an actor from a marginalized group in this country, in terms of representation and in sheer number of jobs.”
On the other hand, Asian American actors filled just 6.3% of roles on Broadway, according to the most recent “Visibility Report” from the Asian American Performers Action Coalition. Plus, as Hwang notes, “It’s still very rare to see AAPI playwrights on Broadway.”
As a producer, Kim works to move the needle on inclusivity with his company 3AD, now following up its first success, ABC’s “The Good Doctor,” with “Butterfly,” a spy thriller and family drama expected to arrive on Amazon Prime next year.
But for now, the actor remains focused on getting the laughs in “Yellow Face” — because dying may be easy, but comedy is hard. “Pretty soon we’ll know whether we’ve lived to tell the tale,” he said.
To hear the entire conversation with Kim, listen at the link above or download and subscribe to “Stagecraft” on podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the Broadway Podcast Network. New episodes of “Stagecraft” are released every other week.
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