Kim's Convenience: attention must be paid
7 Feb 2025 - Photos by Dahlia Katz

One could be cynical and say that Soulpepper is remounting Kim's Convenience because it is a proven crowd-pleaser that will get butts in seats during these dark times for theatre. But it is also a perfect play for these dark times, focussing on an immigrant family struggling to make an honest living. Kim's Convenience crucially deals with the differences between the immigrant experience and the experiences of their children born in Canada. And the conflicts that arise. While Toronto-centric, one can't help but think painfully of our neighbours to the south, the story is universal. It is also important to remember that Kim's Convenience began life as a 2011 Fringe Festival production, produced and financed by playwright/actor Ins Choi and given that opportunity only by the luck of the draw. That it became a hit in a Soulpepper revival and around the world, before spawning a television series that was also a hit before an acrimonious demise, was not expected. All despite the only radical component of the play being its embrace of Korean immigrants and their stories. 

Kim's Convenience is well-constructed, very funny, and ultimately moving. A riff on A Death of a Salesman (another "radical" play that became a classic) with a happy ending. That is if one discounts the macguffins of gentrification and a looming Walmart engulfment. If not, the final image becomes a tragedy. The happy ending is for the family relationships, not a solution to the problems that kick the plot in motion. Because Kim's Convenience is most of all about the sanctity of family. Through trials, tribulations and fights, familial love will triumph. Choi is particularly adept at illuminating the spaces between what characters say and what they mean. What is unspoken. There are passages when Appa (Choi) and Umma (Esther Chung) speak to each other in Korean. Their physicality and gestures translate more effectively than subtitles. This is an astounding cast who live their roles without losing the comedy or slapstick, building to the climax where so much is said with so little that it is breathtakingly bittersweet.

Umma and estranged son Jung (Ryan Jinn) have a particularly poignant passage, filled with hesitations and revelations that are a sharp contrast to the sturm und drang, grudgingly loving, relationship between Appa and his daughter Janet (Kelly Seo). Janet continues the family tradition of talking in metaphors during a delightful flirtation with the policeman Alex (Brandon McKnight) who was a childhood friend of Jung. Like all families, what seems like cross purposes, saying things designed to wound, and trying to get one's own way, is all complicated by good intentions and love. Appa is a wonderfully comic creation which Choi plays to the hilt, struggling to conceal the pain underneath while making it crystal clear. A rat-a-tat dissection of how to identify shoplifters is comic gold, but also questions just how we perceive and stereotype. He states what is often thought but was, pre-MAGA, rarely spoken. McKnight, as well as Alex, plays three characters (transforming in rapid fire costume changes worthy of Ludlam) who illustrate and subvert stereotypes effectively. As well as visualizing the universality of the story.

My partner, who was only lured out on a bitterly cold night by our mutual affection for re-runs of the sitcom, is the son of immigrants. For him the comedy was also triggering. Lancing wounds with laughter in order to help them heal. For him it wasn't just universal, it was personal. But judging from the collective emotion that only theatre can instigate in a group of disparate people, everyone in the attendance was relating to Appa's quest to secure his legacy. Or to two fathers driven to do the best they can for their offspring. Or a daughter struggling to break free of an overbearing father. Or a mother trying to help her son to redemption. Or a childhood crush trying to blossom into a sturdy romance. All the stuff we all live through in one way or another. Director Weyni Mengesha wisely uses theatrical effects sparingly—though one transformation does raise the hairs on the back of one's neck—grounding the story in a reality we all recognize. The corner store is painstakingly designed by Joanna Yu and it feels like somewhere we have been. And probably taken for granted. After the raucous comedy and gentle tears of Kim's Convenience, "attention must be paid" to a corner store owner, to one's own family, to all immigrants. And one will never be cynical about crowd-pleasing programming again.