Review: In Hollywood, No One Can Hear You Scream

"Yankee Dawg You Die," East West Players, Los Angeles, July 3 – 27, 2025

July 15, 2025 | By Bruce R. Feldman

In Brief: East West Players revives a seminal 1980s play about how Asian-Americans are portrayed in movies and television. The good news is that it’s stylish, poetic, and engagingly acted. The bad news is that the play’s themes are still pertinent some 35 years later.

Daniel J. Kim and Kelvin Han Yee in Yankee Dawg You Die at East West Players (Photo: Andrew Ge)

“I did not go into the film business to be symbolized as someone else's vision of me,” Sidney Poitier declared in a 2013 television interview. By that time, the performer had been a major movie star for three decades. He could afford to boast.

Vincent Chang, the aging actor at the center of Yankee Dawg You Die, enjoyed a moderately successful career and was a role model for Asian-American audiences. To everyone else, he was Hollywood’s go-to guy for playing unsavory oriental villains or menial supporting characters.

Regrets, Vincent has a few.

He meets Bradley Yamashita, an ambitious, up-and-coming actor, at a Hollywood party. Bradley envisions a new show business, one that will break barriers and finally free Asian artists from stereotypical roles.

Where the veteran performer mastered the careful art of survival – achieving modest fame and making a comfortable living in films and TV – the young hopeful yearns for authenticity, eager to redefine how Asians are portrayed on screen.

During a series of chance meetings at swank parties, tense auditions, and fashionable restaurants over the course of about a year, Bradley and Vincent confront their generational differences and shared frustrations, at first with polite disapproval and ultimately with warmth and understanding. Their developing friendship is the heart of this on-point revival of Philip Kan Gotanda’s influential play.

Gotanda skillfully negotiates the issues of minority representation, artistic expression, and Asian-American identity with grace and sharp humor. He presents the clashing views of the two characters sympathetically. He’s not judgmental. He seems to acknowledge if not exactly accept that Hollywood – and by extension, I suppose, the world – is unforgiving, uncharitable, slow to change.

The simmering dramatic tension between the two main characters – beautifully rendered by Kelvin Han Yee as the elder actor and Daniel J. Kim as the fledging – as well as  the age-old strain between minority communities and the entertainment industry keep the audience on edge.

Jason H. Thompson’s often-dreamy projections on Yuri Okahana-Benson’s tidy set heighten the unexpected underlying lyricism in Gotanda’s writing. The storytelling is straightforward and serious, but there’s poetry, too. The combination intoxicates, if you let it.

Credit director Jennifer Chang for weaving these diverging stylistic elements into a lovely, stimulating theatrical pleasure.

This revival of Yankee Dawg You Die arrives at a pivotal moment in the arts, as does David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face, which earned rave reviews on Broadway this year for effectively treating many of the same unsettling themes as Gotanda did.

And with the current White House censuring artists and decimating arts institutions across the nation, Gotanda and Hwang’s message of strength through diversity and authenticity offers hope that this spiteful cultural hegemony can one day be expunged from the nation's soul.

At least it’s a start.

“Yankee Dawg You Die," East West Players, 120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles, CA 90012, 213-625-7000, www.eastwestplayers.org