He has a few identity issues

DHH (Hoon Lee), the playwright's surrogate, wants the producers to hire Marcus after being impressed by his audition. So what if the part requires an Asian to don whiteface during the protest scene against "Miss Saigon"? In a pointed instance of self-irony, DHH lambastes his producer for saying that Marcus doesn't have Asian features and might confuse audiences when he takes off his whiteface makeup and still looks white. "Asian faces come in a variety of shapes and sizes -- just like any other human beings," he says, before being hoisted on his own petard of political correctness.

When DHH discovers that Marcus really doesn't have a drop of Asian blood, he panics and tries to pass him off as a "Russian Siberian Asian Jew" to a bunch of activist students at the Asian American Resource Center in Boston, where the play is in tryouts.

It's a funny scene, even if it's staged with not much more subtlety than a community theater revue skit, a problem that hampers much of the work's topsy-turvy comedy.

Eventually DHH has the producers fire Marcus, which isn't such a tragedy given the show's ultimate fate. And don't underestimate the ever-resourceful Marcus, who's able to parlay his stint in a DHH play into a flourishing career as an Asian theater star. Not only does he triumph in "The King and I," but he even starts dating DHH's ex-girlfriend, actress Leah (Julienne Hanzelka Kim), a development that only exacerbates the playwright's resentment.

As DHH sees it, Marcus is an "ethnic tourist" and opportunist, yet when the U.S. government begins harassing people of Asian descent (everything from the investigations into whether the Chinese were funneling money to the Democratic Party to the arrest of nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee), it's Marcus who leads the civil rights charge and eventually travels to China in search of some lost connection he hauntingly feels in the music of the Dong people.

"Yellow Face" has fun tracking the slipperiness of racial identity. What does it mean to be a member of an ethnic community? Who can claim to be oppressed? Is our public identity merely a mask? And if so, where does our true nature lie?

These questions have been of enduring dramatic interest to Hwang, and "Yellow Face" finds him in fine contemplative form. There may seem something self-indulgent about a play in which the playwright has a central role. And some may look askance at the way Hwang brings in the story of his late father, Henry Y. Hwang, a prominent California banker who was embroiled in a front-page New York Times scandal involving money laundering for the Chinese government. (Tzi Ma plays both HYH and Wen Ho Lee, and "Yellow Face" draws parallels between their situations.)