 |
| Randall Duk Kim, Pat Suzuki, Tina Chen. |
The second of Frank Chin’s
plays about Chinese-Americans and their problems of social and cultural
assimilation once again starred Randall (Duk) Kim and was given by the American
Place Theatre. Its major point of interest was the realistic depiction of a
milieu unfamiliar to the average American audience. The play itself was fairly
conventional in its look at family issues, the generation gap, and the
self-realization of a budding writer.
It tells of a San
Francisco Chinatown family whose dying patriarch, Pa Eng (Conrad Yama), is the
community’s mayor. It is the Chinese New Year and Pa Eng has gathered his brood
to be with him when he passes. Around him are his first wife (Pat Suzuki), his
successful restaurateur daughter from Boston (Tina Chen), his Caucasian
son-in-law (Doug Higgins), his tourist guide son (Kim), and a shiftless younger
son (Keenan Shimizu).
The play pictures the
tensions that run through this group—parental, marital, cultural, and social. A
good deal of the play focuses on the older son’s struggle with his father over
the son’s future responsibility toward the family vis-à-vis his desire to
become a writer.
Aside from the
inherent interest in presenting a world then infrequently seen on the
mainstream stage, the play provoked little enthusiasm. It was too
discursive and lacking in “energy,” according to Clive Barnes. Edith Oliver
faulted it for being “not yet as strong as it could be” because there was
insufficient command of the dramatic action. John Simon concurred, noting that,
despite “flashes of wit and flights of anger,” it lacked “discipline” and
bordered on soap opera.
There were
respectable notices for the acting, especially for Randall Kim, although Simon
thought “his mannerisms are becoming disruptive.”
Do you enjoy Theatre’s Leiter Side? As you may know,
since New York’s theatres were forced into hibernation by Covid-19, this blog
has provided daily posts on the hundreds of shows that opened in the city, Off
and on Broadway, between 1970 and 1975. These have been drawn from an
unpublished manuscript that would have been part of my multivolume Encyclopedia of
the New York Stage series,
which covers every show, of every type, from 1920 through 1950. Unfortunately,
the publisher, Greenwood Press, decided it was too expensive to continue the
project beyond 1950.
Before I began offering these 1970-1975 entries, however, Theatre’s
Leiter Side posted over 1,600 of my actual reviews for shows from 2012
through 2020. The first two years of that experience were published in separate
volumes for 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 (the latter split into two volumes). The
2012-2013 edition also includes a memoir in which I describe how, when I was
72, I used the opportunity of suddenly being granted free access to every New
York show to begin writing reviews of everything I saw. Interested readers can
find these collections on Amazon.com by
clicking here.
Next up: Yentl, The Yeshivah Boy
