'I became the public face of the protesters' … David Henry Hwang  I lied to producer Cameron Mackintosh. In 1991, Mackintosh had announced the Broadway transfer of his hit West End musical Miss Saigon, a retelling of Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly set against the backdrop of the Vietnam war. The brilliant Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce would reprise his starring turn as the Engineer, a Eurasian pimp. Many Asian Americans and others regarded Pryce's casting as an example of "yellow face" casting. While black face – a Caucasian actor applying make-up to portray a character of African descent – was generally considered a relic of a more racist past, yellow face (as well as brown face and red face) remains a more common practice to this day.  Because my play M Butterfly had been a recent hit on Broadway and the West End, I became the public face of the protesters, along with the star of my show, BD Wong. As the first major US controversy over yellow face erupted, the vast majority of the US's artistic and political leaders dismissed our objections as political correctness run amok.  Questions of who should be allowed to play certain parts, of minority actors in an increasingly diverse society, of what it really means to "play" another race or culture, are complicated. Yet this dispute rapidly devolved into a media smackdown: would the powerful British producer defeat the outraged Asian actors? All sides considered themselves the victims: Asians argued that we had long been deprived of the opportunity even to play ourselves, whereas whites felt their artistic freedom was violated by an overly sensitive interest group crying racism.  In the end, Pryce performed the Engineer to great acclaim, and Miss Saigon became one of Broadway's longest-running hits. Given the bitter defensive tone of the debate, however, I wondered how our multiracial society could move forward together?  Over the next 15 years, I attempted to grapple with this question. My 1993 play, Face Value, was a failed attempt to write a farce of mistaken racial identity: it closed in previews on Broadway. In 2007, I premiered Yellow Face at New York's Public theatre. A stage mockumentary, or unreliable memoir, it features an Asian American playwright named DHH who, after protesting the casting of Jonathan Pryce in Miss Saigon, accidentally casts a white actor as the Asian lead in his own play, Face Value, believing him to be of mixed race. When DHH discovers that his leading man is 100% white, he tries to cover up his blunder to protect his reputation as an Asian American role model. I felt I had finally succeeded in writing my comedy of mistaken racial identity.  A wise friend once said that, in order to have a conversation about race with a member of a different race, you have to be willing to make a fool of yourself. With Yellow Face I inadvertently stumbled on a way to apply this principle dramaturgically. DHH is the most foolish character in the show, giving audiences permission to laugh at controversies over race and culture. And perhaps laughter leaves us a bit more open to consider differing points of view.  My own opinions about race face casting have evolved over the years. Today, I see it as largely an employment, rather than an artistic, issue. On Broadway and in the major New York theatres, roughly 80% of all roles are currently cast with white actors. Social justice concerns aside, this would be a poor diversity statistic in any industry, and a bad business model. As audiences grow more diverse, the theatre continues to draw from an increasingly shrinking, aging portion of the population.  All sides on this debate can agree that theatres and producers should cast the best actor or actress for the job. When 80% of those hired come from only one ethnic group, however, is the best performer even getting a chance to audition?  I wrote a letter objecting to Pryce's casting. And, yes, I lied to Cameron Mackintosh. Back in 1991, during an angry lunch, Mackintosh accused me of stirring up trouble by leaking my letter to the press. Frightened and overwhelmed, I denied having done so. But the truth is, he was correct. I've never admitted this publicly, and now apologize to Cameron Mackintosh for my deception. It's interesting to look back, almost 25 years later, on the aftermath of the Saigon dispute.  After Pryce, Mackintosh ensured that every subsequent Engineer be played by an actor of Asian descent, creating an important employment opportunity. Furthermore, the London production of Yellow Face, which opened at the Park theatre in 2013, has now transferred to the National Theatre, whose artistic director, Nicholas Hytner, was the original director of Miss Saigon with Jonathan Pryce. So history moves on, sometimes surprising us, until the next controversy.  • Read Michael Billington's review of Yellow Face at the Shed• Where are Britain's East Asian actors and playwrights?• Rufus Norris: why black actors get a raw deal in UK theatre
David Henry Hwang: The American playwright explains why favouring white actors on stage is a bad business model – and publicly admits a secret about the Miss Saigon yellow-face controversy for the first time