STAGE REVIEW : Stereotypes Skewered in ‘Yankee Dawg’

In fact, we don’t want to see ourselves as others see us. Actors face the pain of it at every audition, particularly minority actors. Sorry, you’re not the type. They know what that means.

Philip Kan Gotanda’s “Yankee Dawg You Die” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center has Kelvin Han Yee as a young Asian-American actor who comes to Hollywood determined not to prostitute himself, and Sab Shimono as an older Asian-American actor who, proudly, never turns down a part.

The play begins at a Hollywood party, and ends with another one. In the months between, Yee learns the difference between theory and fact when it comes to making a living, and Shimono discovers that he does, after all, have some backbone.

But Shimono’s victory doesn’t balance Yee’s defeat. It is seen as the rule in a system--we are not just talking about The Industry here--which “likes the lie” of racial stereotyping. The Asian-American actor who won’t play houseboys won’t eat.

We respect Shimono more for dealing with this truth straight out than we do Yee for denying his compromises even as he is making them. But there’s sympathy for both men, plus amusement at the vanity that goes with being an actor, whatever one’s age or ancestry.

It’s an engaging script that doesn’t want to pound its message into the ground. Sharon Ott’s production (imported from the Berkeley Repertory Theatre) is equally playful. At one point Shimono waddles on as Godzilla, one of Yee’s heroes as he was growing up in Stockton. A Japanese-American kid needs all the role models he can find.

What “Yankee Dawg” doesn’t do is go to the mat. In this it’s very much like Yee, who finds in the middle of an improv session with Shimono that he can’t strike out in anger.

Not a small problem for an actor. The scene could unleash all kinds of demons (in Shimono too) if it continued in the present tense. But the pressure escapes in a monologue about how Yee supposedly killed somebody as a teen-ager.

That’s not nearly as interesting as what might happen between a young actor who has been coming on as the hottest thing since Mickey Rourke, and an old actor who is tired of being condescended to.

In a two-character play, the characters had better come to grips with each other as well as with the larger situation. These two have a lot of coffee together, but not until the very end of the play do they meet--a little late for our purposes. It’s a pity because these actors could have taken the play deeper.

Shimono makes the older actor a man of many faces, something habitual to him after all these years. We see the ego, but we also see the artist. We see the control and we also see the fear, sometimes within an eyelash of one another.

Yee gives the young actor as much fatuousness as he can summon, trusting that we won’t ever quite turn off from the character. We don’t. There’s something likable and worth saving under all that smarm.

Ott’s production has lots of pizazz, with pop art panels and rear-projection stills that evoke the worst of Hollywood Orientalism. Kent Dorsey did these and the show’s red-and-black hard-edged set. Lydia Tanji’s costumes are also special, particularly the one for Godzilla, exactly the living pickle mentioned in the script.

“Yankee Dawg You Die” isn’t afraid to be fun. But it does back off from confrontation.

Plays Tuesdays-Sundays at 8 p.m., with Saturday-Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Tickets $22-$25. Closes July 10. 514 S. Spring St. (213) 627-5599.

“YANKEE DAWG YOU DIE”

Philip Kan Gotanda’s play, at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. A production of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. With Sab Shimono and Kelvin Han Yee. Director Sharon Ott. Set design and projections Kent Dorsey. Lighting design Dorsey and Douglas D. Smith. Costumes Lydia Tanji. Original music Eric Drew Feldman and Stephen LeGrand. Sound design Jon Gottlieb. Stage manager Michael Suenkel.