Yellow Face, which wraps a successful revival run at Roundabout’s Haimes Theater today, is a semi-autobiographical play written by David Henry Hwang. How semi-autobiographical? The main character, DHH, is a playwright trying to stage a production of David Henry Hwang’s own 1993 play Face Value, a notorious flop from the author of M. Butterfly, which had made Hwang the first Asian American playwright to win a Tony Award for Best Play in 1988.

But Yellow Face also concerns the U.S. government’s fear of Chinese interference in American elections, and the suspicion that fell on Chinese churches, Chinese scientists and Chinese businessmen, including David’s own father, Henry Yuan Hwang. If all this sounds au courant, consider that Yellow Face was first produced nearly 20 years ago, in 2007, first in Los Angeles and then in New York at the Public Theater.

“It’s amazing,” Francis Jue tells Observer. Jue plays HHH, the character based on Henry Yuan Hwang, having first played the role at the Public. “David wrote Yellow Face 20 years ago when it was happening, but it feels like it’s a play of today. We’re still talking about the same questions. What do we believe America is? Who should be able to decide who we are? Why can’t we decide for ourselves? I feel grateful to be doing this show right now because it feels like I am not just sitting at home screaming at my TV. I can do his play and talk to people about how we’re all in this together.”

In the ‘90s, David Henry Hwang wrote Face Value to address issues of representation, after the furor that erupted when he criticized the casting of an Englishman, Jonathan Pryce, as an Asian in Miss Saigon. One part of Yellow Face is a farce about who gets to play who and the frustrations that DHH endures while staging Face Value (which folded fast after its eighth preview). But the other part involves the crushing of HHH’s immigrant dreams. The first part gets laughs; the second part draws tears.

Henry Yuan Hwang started out a laundryman, took a sharp right turn and became a successful banker who founded the Far East National Bank. In the 1990s—during government investigations into supposed Chinese involvement into money-laundering and campaign interference—the U.S. stripped the Far East National Bank of its charter. Henry was a true-blue believer in the American way of life; he saw himself as something of a James Stewart doing good for others. The government’s devaluing of Chinese citizens was a bruising betrayal of his beliefs, and the threat of prison time further deepened his bitterness.

Like M. Butterfly, Yellow Face was a Pulitzer Prize finalist when it was first presented in 2007. Francis Jue’s performance as HHH at The Public won him both the Obie Award and the Lucille Lortel Award. Now, 17 years later, he’s on Broadway going for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor. Considering how perfectly Jue fits the part, it’s hard to imagine that he wasn’t first choice for it. But when Yellow Face premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, David had another actor in mind for the father role, Tzi Ma, an actor he had grown up with and who had done a lot of his original plays at The Public. When Ma couldn’t do workshops and readings at Stanford before the L.A. gig, director Leigh Silverman brought Jue aboard but promised he’d never get to play the part—words she subsequently ate when Tzi Ma couldn’t come to do the Public run.

“I had hopes of doing it,” Jue admits, “but it wasn’t mine. I learned very early on that my job was not to take possession of a role. It’s to serve the role. It’s to serve the playwright, what the playwright wants to say, what the director wants to say—and this is a role that I really enjoy because I’ve given the opportunity to work on shows where I agree with what they’re saying.”

The Bay Area native adds, “The brilliance of David and Leigh in this play is that they’re saying, ‘We’re all ridiculous talking ourselves in circles about these issues when they’re very simple. If David’s father believed that he could be Jimmy Stewart, why aren’t we all seen as human beings with the same human potential—without all the fog of seeing people based on where they came from, what class they are, what gender they all are? Why is it so hard for us just to see that? We don’t live in that ideal world yet. We don’t live in a world where it’s okay for white people to play Asians.”

Jue worked hard to develop a father-son rapport with Daniel Dae Kim, who stars as DHH. “There was a moment in rehearsal where, instead of talking to each other on the phone, we face it out toward the audience,” Jue remembers. “We decided we would rehearse it just looking at each other. I recall distinctly being in that rehearsal, just looking at him and suddenly glowing with such pride and admiration for this man as though he really was my son.”

HHH is spared prison but not cancer, which metastasizes as the investigations come up empty-handed. Jue does an elegantly understated job of reciting the obit David actually wrote for Henry. Then he moves into a mist-heavy background uncertain where to turn.

“It took time to figure out what we wanted to say in that moment, how it should be realized,” Jue notes. “Leigh, to her credit, gives all of us—actors and designers alike—room to try things. She wants to see it all. She says, ‘Try this,’ and we come to the same conclusions together.

“I think that anyone who has a parent, anyone who has a kid, will get something from this play. Although it starts as this big farce, it then becomes very serious and very political. It just narrows down to this beautiful relationship between a father and his son, what parents want for their kids that they don’t allow for themselves, what responsibilities kids feel for parents.”

If you were not lucky enough to see Yellow Face on Broadway, despair not. The November 24th final performance will be taped for PBS. “I don’t know when it’s going to air, but they’re hoping that it comes out sometime in the spring,” Jue says. “I’m really happy that this play—this production—is going to have a wider audience. For the next few years, I hope that PBS plays it over and over and over because it’s a great reminder of the hopes that we have for this country and the dreams that we have for the best values of America.”