The Year of the Dragon is a play written by Chinese American playwright Frank Chin. It is one of the first plays by an Asian American playwright to be produced on a mainstream New York stage. It premiered in 1974 at the American Place Theatre, and starred Randall Duk Kim, who had played the lead in Chin's earlier play, The Chickencoop Chinaman. The rest of the cast included Pat Suzuki, Tina Chen, Conrad Yama, Lilah Kan, Doug Higgins, and Keenan Shimizu. The play portrays a Chinese American family in Chinatown, San Francisco during Chinese New Year. Chin wrote the play as a critique of the racism in American society, and the play satirizes "American tourists who eroticize, objectify, and commodify Chinatown and its residents." A television production of the play was filmed by PBS for Great Performances in 1975 with George Takei replacing Kim as Fred, after Kim declined the television adaptation for artistic reasons, feeling that there would not be an adequate amount of rehearsal time for the adaptation to work. The rest of the original cast appeared in the PBS production. In addition to subsequent productions, the play was revived in 2001 by East West Players in 2001, under the direction of Japanese American actor Mako Iwamatsu, who had directed the first EWP production in 1974. Source: Wikipedia (en)