In his new play, “Yellow Face,” David Henry Hwang boldly goes for the gauche. He names his leading man David Henry Hwang (“D H H” in the program notes). He also names characters after his father, as well as actual producers, casting agents, actors, and congressmen. He quotes from reviews of his own plays, and tells jokes about race.

Yet somehow, working with recycled themes and hokey theatrical devices, Mr. Hwang produces an invigorating original. In Leigh Silverman’s agile production, now at the Public, “Yellow Face” triumphs on two counts: as laugh-out-loud comedy, and as an unexpectedly poignant odyssey of self-discovery.

But it fails on at least one count: Tonally, “Yellow Face” ricochets from one mood to another at breakneck speed. Fact bleeds imperceptibly into fiction; dishy theater talk suddenly gives way to sobering federal investigations. And a play that toys with stereotypes occasionally indulges in them. Still, the play’s very messiness captures some of the instability of life as a minority in a media-driven culture, especially one that is continually redefining the terms of the American dream.

As the play opens, D H H — the character — is making headlines by protesting the casting of a white actor, Jonathan Pryce, as the Eurasian lead in the Broadway production of “Miss Saigon.” Such casting, in Mr. Hwang’s estimation, amounts to “yellow face,” the Asian equivalent of blackface. Asian-American actors, he argues, should no longer be “denied the right even to play ourselves,” stuck in a retrograde entertainment twilight zone in which “Bruce Lee [is] passed over in favor of David Carradine for a TV series called ‘Kung Fu.'”

Simultaneously, the sly “Yellow Face” is toying with its own casting. As D H H (Hoon Lee) narrates his journey, a rotating cast of actors fills out the scenes, with each playing a multitude of supporting roles. An Asian-American actor impersonates a Jewish producer, a woman plays a gruff man — not by changing costume or makeup, but through stereotypical accents, dialects, and body language.

This is the first signal that Mr. Hwang intends to have fun with his (albeit serious) premise. The second comes when D H H finds himself struggling to cast the Asian-American lead in his new play. To D H H, one actor, Marcus (Noah Bean), seems perfect for the role. But what about the fact, D H H’s producer asks, that Marcus doesn’t “look Asian”?

And so begins Mr. Hwang’s no-holds-barred investigation of his own assumptions about race — the good, the bad, and (often) the ugly. With impeccable comic timing, Mr. Hwang skewers familiar audition scenarios, such as trying to find out an actor’s race without asking directly (which would violate union rules). As briskly directed by Ms. Silverman, these scenes from the showbiz life recall the crackling hilarity of Douglas Carter Beane’s “The Little Dog Laughed.”

Yet “Yellow Face” has a more serious, unyielding edge, as it also savors the bitter aftertaste left by acts of racial discrimination. In the second act, D H H’s travails on Broadway are eclipsed by the plight of his father, Henry Y. Hwang (Francis Jue), the hardworking C.E.O. of the Far East National Bank, who finds himself accused (and ultimately cleared) of money laundering for the Central Bank of China. The play even expands to encompass the prosecution of Wen Ho Lee, the Chinese-American nuclear scientist accused and cleared of espionage in the late 1990s.

It’s when his father is placed under investigation that Mr. Hwang (the playwright) gets truly angry. The scene between D H H and the unnamed New York Times reporter who writes about his father is the most cartoonish scene in the play. When the vain, rabid reporter (played with unctuous sleaze by Anthony Torn) pushes D H H too far, he vows to make him a character in his next play.

At such moments, the sprawling “Yellow Face” seems about to lose its center. Yet Ms. Silverman’s muscular staging pulls it back onto its tracks, with help from an extraordinarily versatile supporting cast. Mr. Jue, superb in a wide range of roles, is especially touching in the tricky role of D H H’s father, a first-generation American with a passion for Frank Sinatra. And Mr. Lee gives the playwright a nice, underplayed quality, as if he might actually be a writer who wandered onstage. By the time D H H reaches his final monologue, a penetrating and troubling meditation in which he finally unmasks himself, Mr. Lee has the audience eating from the palm of his hand.

As does Mr. Hwang himself. “Yellow Face” is a bold look at one man’s complicated emotions about race in America, and if it overreaches at times, it also admits its flaws. Indeed, the play’s messy, work-in-progress feeling is intimately related to its themes. To hear D H H tell it, life as an Asian-American in 21st-century America is like riding a skateboard on the deck of an unsteady ship: a struggle for one’s own internal balance, waged in a perpetually shifting culture.

Until December 23 (425 Lafayette St. at Astor Place, 212-967-7555).