Missing his own point

A line in David Colman's brief Times sketch of David Henry Hwang made me laugh out loud.

IT would be nice to believe that words are exact, like neat little keys that fit into locks and open doors. But words are picklocks at best. And they become even less precise when discussing ethnicity, as is clear in David Henry Hwang’s new play, “Yellow Face,” at the Public Theater.

The play, which has just been extended through Jan. 13, addresses what happens when the words Chinese and American end up hyphenated. The results are in turn funny and tragic, and always complicated.

This is fitting for Mr. Hwang, who was born and raised in suburban Los Angeles by Chinese-born parents who had almost no interest in bringing their heritage with them.

“I was just an American kid,” he said of his childhood. That certainly changed. After his play “M. Butterfly” won the 1988 Tony Award for best play, he became a kind of spokesman in the early 1990s for Asian authenticity in the theater. The strange events that followed made for complications of their own, which he mines, to his credit, pretty fearlessly in “Yellow Face.”

While the play ultimately wonders, as many do, what the word American means, it also wonders what, if anything, it means to be Chinese. Both terms are simultaneously fraught with significance and so vague as to be virtually meaningless.

“Our notions of authenticity and purity are really just convenient and ultimately superficial,” said Mr. Hwang, sitting in the Brooklyn Heights town house he shares with his wife, Kathryn A. Layng, who is American (whatever that means) and their two children. “Increasingly, race and culture are two different things. The world is a mongrel place.”

Layng is American? So is Hwang. I think the distinction Colman meant to point out is 'Layng, who is white.'