Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 77
David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face is a semiautobiographical work in which the author is represented by a character
known only as DHH, Hwang’s own initials, while Hwang’s father is likewise known only by his initials, HYH. Francis Jue
(left), and Pun Bandhu play the two roles in this 2009 production of the play at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto, California,
directed by the company’s artistic director, Robert Kelly. © David Allen Studio
At times the script marks the name of a character without
giving them any lines, as if they wanted to speak but
couldn’t; rather than “pause,” they “rest” as if playing a
musical score. And In the Blood is one of her more accessible
works! Other plays feature long footnotes, murky
stage directions and descriptions of place—the “great
hole” that lies “in the middle of nowhere” in The America
Play, as noted in the section on stageability, is a perfect
example of this. Speeches are slurred and filled with
inscrutable slang, as if making up a language on the spot.
And yet these many seemingly “difficult” aspects
combine on stage to electric effect. Like Samuel Beckett,
the modernist master, Parks gets at essential and theatrical
truths through abstraction, not direct imitation of
reality. Born in 1964, and raised both in the United States
and Germany, Parks studied with the great American
writer James Baldwin at Mount Holyoke College; it was
Baldwin who, hearing Parks read her stories aloud in
class, first suggested she write for the stage. Parks’ first
play, The Sinners’ Place, earned her cum laude honors in
English—but was turned down for production by Holyoke’s
theatre department on the grounds it was impossible
to stage. Her next play, however, Imperceptible Mutabilities
in the Third Kingdom (1989), won her a coveted Obie
(off-Broadway) award and led to subsequent positions as
resident dramatist at both Yale Repertory Theatre and
the New York Public Theatre, each of which has subsequently
produced several of her plays. In the Public’s
2014–2015 season, she was its “Master Writer Chair of
the Public,” where she occasionally “performed” a piece
called Watch Me Work in the lobby. The piece consisted
of writing in plain sight of the theatergoing audience—a