A road beyond ethnicity

IT SOUNDED LIKE a desperate groan, or maybe it was a guttural, exasperated "Oh, please." But near the finale of a preview performance of David Henry Hwang's new play, "Yellow Face," which opened Sunday night at the Mark Taper Forum, an unidentified female audience member -- was she Anglo? Asian? -- made known her displeasure with one of the protagonist's closing lines.

The offending words? They were relatively straightforward, if not utopian. After a successful career of both deconstructing and embracing the complexities of ethnic and racial identity, the lead character, a Chinese American playwright whose initials are, like his creator's, DHH , throws up his arms and wonders aloud whether "we should take words like 'Asian' and 'American,' like 'race' and 'nation' " and "mess them up so bad no one has any idea what they even mean any more. Cuz, really, when you think about it, has anything human ever been pure?"

Hwang, once an adept player at identity politics and best known for his Tony Award-winning "M. Butterfly," has come to realize that the roles ascribed by our race or ethnicity are just that -- roles we play. In "Yellow Face," his doppelganger DHH concludes that even though he may know a lot about being Asian American, "the real work of ... life -- figuring out who you are, how to live -- had barely even begun."

It's liberating to get beyond the confines of ethnicity, but it's also lonely. And the groan incident suggests that some will resist it fiercely. Still, a generation ago, Hwang's -- or should I say DHH's -- epiphany would have been greeted with an entire chorus of groans. Back then, the U.S. was in the throes of an ethnic renaissance, and a generation of young, college-educated baby boomers chose to wrap themselves up in their minority identities -- racial, ethnic, religious or sexual. On the verge of his 50th birthday, Hwang wonders whether he and others in his generation overestimated the role of ethnicity in making them who they are.

"I think there was a point in my life when I felt that understanding my ethnic identity was the key to knowing who I am," he told me in an interview in a grim, prison-like room at the Taper. "But now I think that's a limited point of view. Sure, it's an essential part of our overall identity, but it's not the whole answer. You can get struck there."