How Daniel Dae Kim Finds the Funny in Broadway’s ‘Yellow Face’

variety.com:

Gordon Cox Theater Editor A little-known fact about Daniel Dae Kim: He’s really, really into “Saturday Night Live.” “I’m a super fan,” says the actor just a few days before starting performances for the revival of David Henry Hwang’s 2007 play “Yellow Face” on Broadway.

Speaking on the latest episode of “Stagecraft,” Variety’s theater podcast, he added, “I have not missed a single episode since probably 1980.” That trivia tidbit may come as a surprise to those who know Kim best for the super-serious characters he plays on TV, like the loyal survivor Jin-Soo Kwon on “Lost” or the upstanding detective Chin Ho Kelly on “Hawaii Five-0.” But now this “SNL” enthusiast is subverting his own morally upright persona in Hwang’s play, in which he stars as a comically flawed version of the Tony-winning playwright. Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below: “Seeing someone like Daniel start to lose it and flounder and act unscrupulously?

That’s pretty funny,” Hwang says. Opening on Broadway Oct. 1, “Yellow Face” is a farcical chronicle of Hwang’s experience leading the 1990 protest against the casting of white actor Jonathan Pryce in a major Eurasian role of “Miss Saigon.” In the play, Kim’s character, DHH, accidentally casts a white actor in an Asian role in “Face Value,” Hwang’s real-life play that flopped on Broadway in 1993.

Although comedy might be a departure for Kim, DHH seems to fall right in the actor’s wheelhouse in other ways. Like Hwang, Kim is a vocal advocate for Asian Americans.