“Fred Eng” – 1974

Review Excerpts

“ALIENATION AND DESPAIR IN THE ASIAN GHETTO….Randall Kim, one of the most talented and skilled young Asian actors in the business today, brings strength, vitality, and pathos to the role of Fred, a bitter forty-year-old Chinatown tour guide. Fred has abandoned his life-long dream of becoming a famous writer in order to look after his family in Chinatown. If the choice is selfless, it is equally self-destructive. His life is an endless carnival of Chinatown tours…But underneath the gibes, the clowning, the crude cynicism, is a deeply tormented and frustrated human being….”
               –Genny Lim, EAST/WEST (6/5/1974)

“’YEAR OF THE DRAGON IS NEW FRANK CHIN PLAY….We have a great deal of theater in black and white but not too much in yellow…. …the performances were excellent. Randy Kim (who according to the program is now styling himself Randall Duk Kim) is an excellent actor with a quite individual tautness to his performances. He here conveys a peculiar but endearing mixture of toughness and vulnerability ringed round with cynicism….”
               –Clive Barnes, NEW YORK TIMES (6/3/1974)

“’YEAR OF THE DRAGON’ OBTUSE FAMILY DRAMA….The actor Randy Kim, now going under the name Randall (Duk) Kim, is rapidly developing into one of our most resourceful players. But all the efforts of this small, wiry man with the big voice can’t lend more than a flickering interest to a discursive and ill-made play….”
               –Douglas Watt, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS (6/3/1974)

“’THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON’ OFFERS CHINATOWN FARE….And the cast is a knock-out. Keep an eye especially on Randall Kim. You’ll be hearing a lot from him. He plays the tour-manager, the ‘No. 1 son’ who acts as family lifeguard despite some scathing contempt from his father. Aside from being a very funny man…Kim has a sharp understanding of his character. He finds the role beneath the role, the oppressor within the victim….”
               –Edmund Newton, NEW YORK POST (6/3/1974)

“PLAY HAS FORCE AND TOUCHING BEAUTY….The problem is that Number One son in Frank Chin’s fascinating drama about a Chinatown family, ‘The Year of the Dragon’ at the American Place Theatre, hasn’t had very many jolly times at all. Fred, the old man’s heir, played with such force and beauty by Randall ‘Duk’ Kim,…is the prisoner of his family,….One of the greatest assets of the evening is Randall ‘Duk’ Kim’s brilliant performance as the cocky Chinatown guide who’s bleeding inside with hurt, hatred and confusion….”
               –William A. Raidy, LONG ISLAND PRESS (6/3/1974)

“’DRAGON’ FEROCIOUSLY FUNNY….Chin writes in a poetic free-form manner…. His hero hates the Establishment with a fierce passion, and he rails at what he considers its sick racism against Orientals….His speeches constitute one loud scream at the insensitivity of white Americans…. The cast is brilliant. The performers are mostly Asian-Americans. Randall Kim as the hero offers one of the towering performances of this or any season. He etches an intense portrait of a Chinese-American undergoing an identity crisis….”                   -Emory Lewis, BERGEN RECORD (6/3/1974)

“FIGHTING FAMILY DRAGONS….Kim has composed a performance better than what the playwright has given him, full fervency and humor and high, acerb irony, all brought off with a rather breathtaking technical ease, not a line or prop or gesture wasted, nothing given less than its due, and yet nothing made overdone or showy….In his moments of self-mockery, Kim’s face takes on, not inappropriately, the creases and the jagged grin of Jason Robard’s Hickey. It’s his play….and Kim’s performance cuts through all the hesitancies with ease.”
               –Michael Feingold, VILLAGE VOICE (6/6/1974)

“THE THEATER MEANS TRANSFORMATION….Frank Chin’s ‘The Year of the Dragon’…is a play about the angry, anguished, forever frustrated efforts of a 40-year-old man to break free of the cocoon that binds him tight….an American rather than the Oriental he was born…He is a sad, funny, savagely mocking prisoners as Randall ‘Duk’ Kim plays him, faking a sing-song accent…half-laughing, half-crying as he watches a family destroy itself by clinging to two cultures without really living inside either. Mr. Kim is a superb actor, as regular patrons of the American Place well know. 
               –Walter Kerr, NEW YORK TIMES (6/9/1974)

“SWEET AND SOUR….Chin’s new play again pivots about a character largely himself, here called Fred Eng …A gifted writer and electric sensibility,…Under Russell Treyz’s direction the cast at the American Place Theater is strong, especially Conrad Yama as the father, the epitome of impossible autocratic love; and the extraordinary Randall Kim, who plays Fred like a trapped animal, prowling and hissing in the cage of his confined identity.”
               -Jack Kroll, NEWSWEEK (6/10/1974)

“REUNION….‘The Chickencoop Chinaman,’…launched…that magnetic marvel Randy Kim, as a potential star,…As for Mr. Kim, he is…unpacking his soul in one blistering, sarcastic monologue after another, flinging every cliché about the Chinese into the face of the audience, and boiling over with rage and love and temperament. Mr. Kim makes the play into a vehicle for Fred every time he opens his mouth—but then, earlier this season, he even made ‘The Tempest’ into a (sporadic) vehicle for Trinculo….”
               –Edith Oliver, NEW YORKER MAGAZINE (6/10/1974)