David Henry Hwang’s “Yellow Face” is a difficult play to review. The playwright has made himself the lead character, and he fills this semi-autobiographical story with lots of other real names, from Ed Koch to Frank Rich, and he quotes from them. But the play’s bad guy is completely made up, and Hwang doesn’t reveal this fact until its end. Hwang is clever to the extreme in his deceptions.
To the credit of director Leigh Silverman and actor Daniel Dae Kim, the first Broadway revival of “Yellow Face,” which opened Tuesday at Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theater, plays much more as a broad farce than it did in its New York City debut in 2007 at the Public Theater.