It’s a well-worn bit of audition advice for actors: Don’t telegraph that you really want the part you are up for — just do your thing. A corollary: The creative freedom you gain when you have relinquished your thirst for a role may spur you to make fearless choices that can seal the deal.
Francis Jue has borne out this wisdom over a long and lauded career, which has reached a new height with his bittersweet turn as the blustery patriarch in David Henry Hwang’s hall-of-mirrors comedy “Yellow Face,” now on Broadway. Critics have rained superlatives on his performance: In his review for The New York Times, Jesse Green called it “masterly”; others have hailed it as both “a comic jolt” (Variety) and “heart-busting” (Time Out New York).
The ability to wring laughs as well as tears from audiences is a superpower that has made Jue a go-to actor not only for Hwang (with roles in his shows “Soft Power” and “Kung Fu”), but also for “multiple generations of Asian American playwrights,” said Mike Lew, who cast him in his play “Tiger Style!”
Lew called Jue “puckish yet rooted, razor-sharp-witted, yet equally gifted with physical comedy.”
Remarkably, his victory lap in “Yellow Face” is a return to a role he first performed in the play’s New York premiere at the Public Theater in 2007. Still more remarkably, it is a part he was never seriously considered for — until he showed what he could do with it.
It was in the mid-2000s that Hwang called Jue “out of the blue and asked me to read scenes at the Lark,” Jue recalled in a recent interview, referring to the now defunct play development center. There he was handed a scene between DHH, the self-doubting playwright character based on Hwang himself, and HYH, based on Hwang’s own chatty banker father, and learned his character’s attributes as he read along: “Oh, I have an accent. Oh, I’m an immigrant, I used to work in a laundry. Now I own a bank. Wow, OK.”
More workshops followed, but when it came time to cast the play’s premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, a co-production with the Public, Jue was told that the part would go to Tzi Ma, a longtime associate of Hwang’s.
Then Jue got another call.
“They were going to do another workshop at Stanford before they started in L.A., and for whatever reason the other actor couldn’t do that workshop,” Jue said. He recalled the show’s director, Leigh Silverman, saying: “You will never play this part, but we’d be very grateful if you would come to Stanford and help us work on this play. OK?”
Jue wavered, wondering to his husband, “Am I just a doormat if I do this?” But he took the gig, and it went swimmingly. “I knew I was never going to do the part, so it freed me up just to play,” said Jue, who eventually secured the role for its New York run after Ma premiered it in L.A. “I was having a blast.”
Jue looks as if he is still having a blast onstage in the show’s Broadway debut at the Todd Haimes Theater. He is part of a six-member ensemble led by Daniel Dae Kim as DHH, the hapless playwright who faces a career crossroads over a casting controversy. What Jue brings to the role of DHH’s father, Silverman said, is that he takes a character who is “impossible in so many ways and makes you love him.”
“You need an actor who can both enjoy the character’s eccentricities but that you also just fall in love with, so they can deliver the emotional punch that the play requires,” she added.
Indeed, the arc that HYH traces — from a Chinese immigrant with a sunnily patriotic belief in the American dream to a dying man disillusioned by the nation’s persistent anti-Asian xenophobia — lands harder this time, Hwang feels, because Jue “is older and more mature and has the gravitas and weight.”
Offstage, Jue, 61, has a soulful, searching presence; if anything, age seems to have made him lighter. A Bay Area native who cut his teeth on musical theater roles, he got his first New York acting credit in a 1984 Off Broadway revival of “Pacific Overtures” while studying English literature at Yale. In that production, he found himself “surrounded by Asian actors who were all making it in one way or another,” and felt inspired to follow acting dreams he had barely dared to entertain. His parents, he said, would only approve of his doing “extracurricular fun stuff” if he kept his grades up. But even musical theater was never mere fun for Jue. “I always took it very seriously,” he said.
Another breakthrough came in 1989, when he was cast as an understudy in Hwang’s “M. Butterfly” on Broadway. Jue also started appearing in classical roles at the Public, landing a part in a Steven Berkoff-directed “Richard II” in 1994 via that old standby: letting go of desire for the job. In the midst of a competitive audition process that he compared to a “mosh pit,” he reasoned, “I’m never going to get it — so I’ll just jump in.”
Jue has since approached the business of acting with eminent practicality, serving as a national councilor for Actors’ Equity Association for 18 years and taking TV work as it comes, including recurring roles on the TV series “Madam Secretary” and “The Good Wife.” But he views his stage work “as a spiritual exercise, this relationship to a script and the relationship to an audience.”
The playwright Lauren Yee, who grew up hearing her aunt rave about Jue’s performances at TheatreWorks in California — as the Emcee in “Cabaret” and Mozart in “Amadeus” — later worked with him on two of her plays: “Cambodian Rock Band,” in which he played a seductive yet menacing torturer, and “King of the Yees,” in which he played a version of her father.
“He is such a creature of the theater,” Yee said. “There’s something immediately alive and theatrical about him.” She added that while Jue is “inherently kind and supportive, there’s also this competitive spark to him. He’s always pushing himself to be better, to learn, to figure out the characters and what makes them tick.”
For his part, Jue said he feels a debt to dramatists because, as he put it, “Writers have imagined for me, and encouraged me not to apologize or ask permission.”
That confidence boost comes in handy with a role like HYH. Jue said that Hwang has described his father as “a man who stood tall; whenever he walked into a room, he was the star of that room. I love playing him because it’s hard for me to imagine myself being that.”
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