Losing Face Value on Broadway

Closing Night
Sep 29
13 min read

Updated: Oct 5

David Henry Hwang sets out to write a play that turns race issues into a farce.

Mark Linn-Baker and Jane Krakowski (Joan Marcus, via New York Public Library)

In the late 80s and early 90s, when Broadway was still basking in the glow of the big spectacle megamusical, cracks in that shiny veneer were beginning to show. Conversations about race, identity, and representation were bubbling up in new ways, and nowhere was that more evident than in the controversy surrounding Miss Saigon, which we talked about in the previous episode. And provides the necessary background and context to these questions about authenticity in writing and casting. The people raising them were often dismissed, shouted down, or simply ignored. The industry was resistant to change, and those who dared challenge its long-standing practices were left feeling like outsiders in their own profession.

And Miss Saigon, with its casting of a white actor in a Eurasian role, was seen as yet another instance of erasure, of denying opportunities to Asian performers in the one place where representation should matter most: a story set in Asia, with Asian characters. Protests erupted, letters were written, and public statements were made by actors like BD Wong and playwrights like David Henry Hwang. Both artists were celebrated for the Tony-winning play M. Butterfly and were both using their position in the Broadway community to speak out.

Hwang - “So, you know, in 1990, during the original Miss Saigon controversy, those who were kind of defending Jonathan Pryce's right to play the Engineer, which was the vast majority of the cultural and artistic establishment, the argument was, why do you have to worry about race? It's just acting. And, you know, and that statement is wrong in a lot of ways, because it sort of ignores the institutional and historic bias in this country where white people traditionally have gotten to play everybody else. And people of color sometimes get to play themselves.”

However, the experience of the Miss Saigon protests left Hwang shaken. And so like many writers, Hwang turned to his craft to process those feelings. He began to imagine a farce that could poke at the absurdities of prejudice and the hypocrisies of American theater. The result was Face Value, a play that attempted to turn anger and frustration into laughter.

From the start, the project had everything going for it—a topnotch production team with actors at the top of their game. And besides, Broadway loves a farce, and this one had a bold, topical premise. The plan was to develop it out of town in Boston and then bring it straight to New York. But the journey from page to stage is never simple as Hwang soon discovered.

Hwang - “I think that farce is a really difficult form and it needed a couple more workshops. I needed to really refine it. And I sort of hubristically felt, well, I can get this right in four weeks out of town in Boston. I wasn’t able to.”

What followed was a rocky rehearsal process, an out-of-town tryout met with scathing reviews, and finally, a Broadway run that ended before it even began. That push and pull between vision and execution is part of the magic—and the madness—of making theater. And in this case, the stakes felt even higher. Because the very process of creating this show ended up reflecting the very problems it was trying to critique. Which, as we’ll see, only made its story that much more fascinating.

Welcome to Season Two of Closing Night, a theater history podcast that dives into the stories of Broadway's famous and forgotten shows that closed too soon. I'm Patrick Oliver Jones, an actor and producer based in New York City, and this season I'll be your guide as we uncover the mysteries of productions that never even made it to opening night. Whether they closed out of town or during previews, you'll hear firsthand from those involved, revealing just how unpredictable—and unforgiving—the path to Broadway can be.

Beginnings

David Henry Hwang was born in 1957 in Los Angeles, and didn’t grow up immersed in theater. His earliest connection to performance actually came through his family’s love of music. His mother was a piano teacher, his sister a cellist, and he himself played the violin. That meant summers and school years filled with the sounds of rehearsals. It was in high school that his music would crosspaths with theater. He found himself in pit orchestras for musicals like Fiddler on the Roof and Oklahoma and Kismet, soaking in not only the music but the rhythms of performance. He would linger after rehearsals, listening to directors give notes, slowly learning the craft of storytelling long before he would call himself a playwright.

Hwang - “So by the time I got to college, they had us filled in forms like, ‘Well, what do you want to do here that you've never done before?’ And I put journalism and playwriting. I went to Stanford, and Stanford at the time didn't have any playwriting classes, so I just started writing plays in my spare time. And I found a professor who was a novelist and poet who ran the creative writing department and also taught a class in contemporary drama, named John Leroux.”

After reading one of his plays, Leroux told Hwang bluntly that this first effort was “really bad,” but encouraged him to keep going by actually learning more about theater. Eventually with Leroux’s help, they designed a playwriting major within the creative writing department. But the real turning point came the summer of 1978 before his senior year, when Hwang responded to an ad in the paper to study with famed playwright Sam Shepard. Since Hwang was only one of two applicants the first year of the program, both were chosen for what would later become a prominent event at the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival.

Hwang - “I got to work with Sam and with Maria Irene Fernaz, who I think arguably was the great playwriting teacher of her generation. They taught me to write more from my subconscious, not to structure things very much, not to let the conscious mind and sort of craft even dominate, but really follow your heart, follow your impulses, even if you don't know where they're going. And it was through that that I began writing Asian American characters.”

Public Theater: Tzi Ma, Calvin Jung, Willy Corpus. Photo by Martha Swope

From here Hwang wrote FOB, his first Off-Broadway play at the Public Theater that went on to win the 1981 Obie Award for Best New American Play. By the late 1980s, Hwang was becoming one of the most celebrated up-and-coming voices in American theater. But he reached a new stratosphere with his Broadway debut M. Butterfly in 1988, which not only won the Tony Award for Best Play but was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Broadway had now taken notice, and so had audiences, cementing him as a daring playwright and cultural figure whose voice carried weight in conversations about race, representation, and casting on the American stage.

And then came the controversy that would spark his next work. Miss Saigon created a firestorm by casting Jonathan Pryce in the role of The Engineer, and it was a debate that would become a formative moment for Hwang, as he later reflected.

Hwang - “We were advocating that this was an example of yellowface casting and that the role should go to an Asian actor. And it became sort of a pretty big early culture wars fracas. Ultimately, you know, our side, as it were, lost…But the whole experience of, like, going up against the kind of establishment and speaking out on a race charged topic, everybody was against us pretty much, except for Joseph Papp. And so it was kind of traumatizing. And I wanted to write a play about it.”

That desire to process the theatrical dispute over Miss Saigon through art became the seed for Face Value. Hwang wanted to create a work that would not simply comment on race but would make race itself a question.

Hwang - “I was trying to use that incident [with Miss Saigon] as a jumping off point for doing sort of a Joe Orton like farce about mistaken racial identity. That is, when we start to disguise ourselves as other races, then can we start to confuse ourselves? And what is the meaning of race? Is race only skin deep? And I still think it’s a really fun idea.”

Writing Face Value

Face Value was conceived as a traditional farce—with plenty of chaos, shenanigans, and mistaken identities—but with a political message at its core. The plot focuses on two Asian Americans who disguise themselves in whiteface to protest the opening night of a Broadway musical called The Real Fu Manchu. And they’re protesting it all because a white actor, Bernard, is cast as the Chinese lead. Bernard, however, keeps slipping in and out of character, juggling an affair with his co-star Jessica while his producer Andrew scrambles to keep protestors at bay.

*Jane Krakowski, Michael Countryman, and Linda Anne Wing*

Things only get wilder when two white supremacists sneak in with real guns that look like props, turning the second act into a hostage standoff, fueled by confusion over who’s who and what race anyone actually is. By the finale, everyone’s paired off in interracial couples — Bernard is with Linda, Jessica with Randall, Andrew with the stage manager Marci — and all of them are married on the spot by one of the terrorists, who just happens to be a pastor thanks to a $13 mail-in ordination. I mean, with a crazy plot like this, Face Value was as much a screwball comedy as it was a farce, and yet Hwang uses comedy for much more than just making people laugh.

Hwang - “I think humor has always sort of been a coping mechanism for me. So particularly…things that either I don't understand or things that I'm actually rather angry about. So when I'm pissed off about something, I'm pretty polite in real life…And so it has to go someplace and going into the work makes sense. But deflecting it through humor also is kind of a passive aggressive way of getting at these issues that sometimes I'm angry about. And…it's not like we are trying to get jokes or trying to get laughs. It's more like creating situations which are inherently comic…And then you just try to write it as truthfully as possible and you see where the jokes are and then maybe polish the jokes. But I don't start out by trying to figure out what are the jokes.”

Hwang would later admit, though, that his first draft of Face Value needed “a lot of development.” Still, that didn’t stop producers Stuart Ostrow and Scott Rudin from signing on. Ostrow had already produced Hwang’s M. Butterfly and well as other byway hits like 1776 and Pippin. Rudin, meanwhile, was a 34-year-old independent film producer making his very first move into Broadway. Together they raised $2 million, which was a considerable sum for a new play at that time. So to helm this big budget production, they brought in seasoned director Jerry Zaks, who was fresh off his Tony win for Guys and Dolls in 1992 and another win for the comedy Lend Me a Tenor in 1989, making him a perfect choice for this new farce.

Casting, though, turned out to be its own challenge. Stuart Ostrow’s notes show that they wanted Randall to be played by someone straight and traditionally masculine, which led to many Asian actors being dismissed for not fitting that mold. Ironic, isn’t it? Hwang’s play was attacking stereotypes, while the production itself was reinforcing them.

Row 1: Dennis Dun, Mark Linn-Baker, Jane Krakowski

Row 2: Gina Torres, Jerry Zaks, William Ivey Long

Eventually, the role of Randall went to an Asian stage and film actor Dennis Dun. Jane Krakowski, fresh from her Tony-nominated run in Grand Hotel, joined as the fluttery Jessica. Mark Linn-Baker, best known from TV’s Perfect Strangers, signed on as Bernard Sugarmann — the white actor in yellowface. And a then-unknown Gina Torres was set to make her Broadway debut as the sharp-tongued stage manager. To top it off, costume designer William Ivey Long, already a Tony winner for Nine, was hired to craft the show’s wardrobe, including elaborate robes and eye-catching garments for The Real Fu Manchu sequences.

The Production Gets Underway

With an out-of-town tryout planned for Boston in February 1993, rehearsals began many weeks before with plenty of energy. But that spark quickly gave way to a process that became intense and often chaotic. The script was in constant motion, with new pages arriving almost daily and entire scenes being cut just as quickly as they were rehearsed. This constant upheaval made it difficult to settle into their roles. Gina Torres later recalled how exhausting it all felt—physically and emotionally—saying that it was like trying to build a plane that was already in flight. Hwang agreed, by later saying that it probably all came together too quickly.

Hwang - “And I guess my hubris was in thinking that I could fix it in three months. And so we opened out of Town in Boston. We got terrible reviews—as opposed to M. Butterfly, where, okay, we got bad reviews out of Town. But then when we came to New York, the audiences seemed to be loving it. This one, we got bad reviews out of town and one of them, I remember the headline was M. Turkey, which, you know, is kind of funny now.”

But at the time, the audiences weren’t laughing nor were the critics. The Boston Globe found it lacking in humor and momentum, saying the play seemed to run out of steam long before the final curtain. Variety struck a similar chord, noting how difficult true farce can be to pull off and implying that Hwang, director Jerry Zaks, and much of the cast never seemed entirely comfortable in the genre. Even the Harvard Crimson, which praised Linn-Baker for being “especially funny” along with other actors, felt the writing and directing weren’t interesting in places and criticized what it called “speechifying” throughout the play, where actors talked about the action rather than showing it.

But in an effort to save face, Rudin called such critiques as just business as usual in the theater, and the press agent pointed out that “Hey, not every notice was totally negative.” But behind the scenes, the atmosphere was tense. More rewrites happened daily as Hwang and Zaks worked feverishly to sharpen the script. The Boston tryout became a test of endurance, not just for the play, but for the team. Scenes were cut, jokes reworked, characters adjusted. There were debates over tone and pacing, and at one point they even considered cutting intermission to speed things along. According to Torres: “it was exhausting, but there was a real commitment to making it work. Still, it was clear something was slipping away.”

And that something was audiences. By the end of the Boston run, the show was bringing in about $80,000 a week in a 1,600-seat theater—barely half of what it would need just to break even. And that shortfall fueled rumors that the show might either delay its Broadway run or simply close out-of-town. Rudin, once again though, brushed aside those doubts, insisting the transfer was still firmly in place, with previews set to start on time at the Cort Theatre. However, without Boston ticket sales, bringing Face Value to New York was now going to cost an additional $200,000, which Rudin steadily raised as revisions continued.

Hwang delivered a new beginning and ending in an attempt to sharpen the farce and clarify its themes. But the biggest change came in replacing lead actor Dennis Dun with someone else, and they chose the award-winning actor from M. Butterfly, BD Wong to play the part of Randall. But he didn’t have much time to rehearse his new role, with previews beginning March 9, 1993. The rest of the cast were filled with hope, tempered by fatigue. Rehearsals and rewrites continued even as the preview performances unfolded. But despite all these changes, audience reaction in New York remained tentative, and word of mouth was weak.

Hwang - “So we got to New York and when the audiences still were not really going for it. And so Stuart and his co producer Scott Rudin, decided to close the show in previews. And it's, I think, the only show in that decade that we're talking about the 90s. I think it might have been the only show in the 90s that closed in previews on Broadway. So obviously it was a big flop."

After just eight previews, Face Value closed on March 14, 1993, having never officially opened. The closure was a blow to everyone involved, which producers blamed on “a lack of box office interest.” For Hwang, though, it became another chapter in a much larger conversation about race, representation, and theater. He returned to these themes years later with Yellow Face, which revamped many of the storylines and themes of Face Value. It would go on to win Hwang his third Obie Award in Playwriting in 2007, and it marked his third time as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. And last year it finally made its way to Times Square for a limited run on Broadway. And during that run, Hwang went to the Columbia School of Arts with Yellow Face director Leigh Silverman to talk about the farcical legacy of Face Value.

Hwang - “It's not completely wrong, the idea of just acting. I mean, that acting itself is transformative. And so I think that was one of the reasons we wanted to try. We're pretty used now to people of color playing white people. If that wasn't normalized before, Hamilton, it certainly is now. But what we haven't seen is people of color playing other people of color. And it seemed a little risky, but interesting to just poke at that a little…And I thought it would be. Yeah, that it would push the envelope a little. And. And some people might like it, and some people might not like it, but it was interesting to open up that discussion."

Closing Night theater history podcast cover art

Closing Night is a production of WINMI Media, with me, Patrick Oliver Jones, as writer and executive producer. Blake Stadnik created the theme music. And Dan Delgado is editor and co-producer not only for this podcast but also for his own movie podcast called The Industry. Much appreciation goes to the following resources listed below. And be sure to check out the next episode as another show makes its way to closing night.

Bonus Clip

Hwang - “So there's a restaurant in the theater district which has been kind of known as a Broadway hangout called Joe Allen. And Joe Allen is decorated with posters of shows that have flopped. In the old days, it was shows that lasted one performance, but there are very few of Those now. So it shows that just are considered failures. And I've always considered it really kind of an egregious oversight that my poster for face value is not up there. So yesterday we hung it on the wall at Joe Allen, and the maître d' said, oh, now this is your table, which is the table next to the poster of my flop. And we put it on Instagram, and it was very healing."

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