SOURCE: "Primary Color," in Newsweek, Vol. 79, No. 25, 19 June 1972, p. 55.

In the generally favorable review below, Kroll notes that The Chickencoop Chinaman "needs more work—the basic emotional tone of hysteria is too unmodulated, the action is too thin, an awkward structure wrenches the play in and out of fantasy. But there is real vitality, humor and pain on Chin's stage."

In the current orgy of consciousness-raising and identity-searching more and more unmelted ingredients in the American melting pot are crawling out of that cooling crucible and shaking themselves dry. And now we have a new playwright, Frank Chin, reminding us in The Chickencoop Chinaman that yellow is a primary color. His play adds a new character to the roster of alienation coming out of our theater and fiction: for Tam Lum the facts of race, culture and psyche compose a nightmare from which he cannot awake. We meet...