The actress and co-founder of the National Asian American Theater Company said that Mr. Hwang’s fame made him a valuable ally in the 1990 protests against casting the white actor Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian lead in “Miss Saigon.” The success of “M. Butterfly” was “a pick-me-up.”

“You feel like, it’s Broadway, and he’s talking about the kind of things that were roiling around in our heads: the stereotypes, the colonial expectations of ‘Oriental’ women, the emasculation of Asian men — all that’s onstage in this very brilliant analysis of ‘Madame Butterfly.’

“In reaction to ‘Miss Saigon,’ I was in charge of putting together this town hall meeting at the Public Theater. The importance of having had a figure like David, and BD, who were very much in the forefront of what was going on with ‘Miss Saigon,’ was huge.

“Since then? All of a sudden there were two or three instances of yellowface in the space of two years just like three, four years ago. So you wonder. What’s going on?”

Julia Cho