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by Ins Choi, directed by Weyni Mengesha

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

January 19-February 11, 2012;

May 17-July 4, 2012

“A Store of Humour and Emotion”

Soulpepper has done playwright and actor Ins Choi a great honour by opening its 15th anniversary season with his play Kim’s Convenience.  The play had won the New Play contest at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2010 and was originally produced at the 2011 Fringe where became a Patron’s Pick and went on to Best of the Fringe Uptown Festival a week later.   It’s easy to understand its success.  In only 90 minutes Choi creates a portrait of a family in contemporary Toronto confronting and accepting change in a style filled with poignancy and abundant humour.

The action takes place in Ken MacKenzie’s amazing hyperrealistic set.  It looks exactly as if he had sliced a real convenience store diagonally in half and transported it to the stage of Michael Young Theatre in the Young Centre.  The only non-realistic aspect are the arched stained glass windows that rise behind one wall of the set and represent the church that is so important in the characters’ lives.

Here we meet Mr. Kim (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee), the store owner as he opens the store in Regent’s Park for business at the start of the day.  He and his wife (Jean Yoon) immigrated to Toronto in the 1980s.  Mr. Kim had been a teacher in Korea but his lack of fluent English barred him from teaching and running a store became his profession.  Kim is proud of his heritage and has inculcated in his children a knowledge of the dates of important events in Korean sports and history including the creation of the nectarine by Kim Hyung-soon.  He also has an instinctive hatred of anything Japanese stemming from Japan’s takeover of the country in 1904 during the Russo-Japanese War and its subsequent rule over Korea as a colony to the end of World War II.  When Kim sees a Japanese make car parked illegally in front of his store he makes his daughter Janet (Esther Jun) dial 911. 

Yet, underneath his bravado he nurses a not-so-secret sorrow.  This sorrow comes to the fore when the real estate agent Mr. Lee (one of four roles played by Clé Bennett) tells Kim that once the condos are finished around Regent’s Park, a Wal-Mart will be moving in that will be certain to take away his business.  Lee offers Kim a very generous sum for the store, enough, in fact, for Kim and his wife to retire.  The problem is that Kim has put everything he is into the store and it is the only visible symbol of what he has accomplished in life.  His constant, suffocating reminders of filial duty have caused his son Jung (Ins Choi) to run away.  In his absence he tries, comically, to force Janet, 30 and still unmarried, to give up her career as a photographer to carry on what he sees as his legacy.                   

Choi’s greatest gift is for comedy and the sequence where Kim attempts to train Janet to recognize who will or will not attempt to steal from the story is very funny.  What the play lacks is any extended conflict or drama.  The conflict Kim has with Janet over how she will live her life and with Jung over his extended absence are resolved quickly and perhaps too easily.  The solution in both cases is an admission of the truth of the situation by all concerned rather than an attempt to promote what should be over what is.  

 

Paul Sun-Hyung Lee gives a hugely enjoyable performance as Mr. Kim, allowing us to see the worry beneath the bluster.  Esther Jun provides an excellent foil, her modern attitude and ordinary Canadian accent pointing out the central conflict between immigrants and their Canadian-born children and their completely different points of reference.  Jean Yoon makes a loveable Umma (“mother”) and in her key conversation with Jung we see how she yearns for reconciliation of father and son but is afraid to suggest it outright for fear of alienating Jung.  Ins Choi conveys with sensitivity the deep dissatisfaction he has with his life.  Clé Bennett distinguishes his four characters so well that at first I didn’t think the person playing the slick real estate agent Mr. Lee could be the same as the hoodie-clad young man speaking a heavy Jamaican patois that Kim suspects as a potential thief.  As the policeman Alex, he and Jun create an onstage chemistry long before their characters decide to go on a date.

What makes Kim’s Convenience unusual is how well is captures the real flavour of living in Toronto.  Choi seems to realize that the essence of Toronto is its constant change.  The changes in Mr. Kim’s neighbourhood affect not only his store but lead to the closing of Mrs. Kim’s church.  Buildings of architectural or sentimental interest are been destroyed every day to be replaced with structures of little visual and no emotional appeal.  Torontonians constantly have to redefine what constitutes the city they mentally inhabit since the physical city is in continual flux.   

According to Toronto City Hall, half of Toronto population was born outside of Canada and 47% have a mother tongue other than English.  Kim’s Convenience so well captures the cultural divide between immigrants and their children that it should speak not only to the Korean community but to at least half the population who will have had similar experiences.  The humour and emotion Choi’s play generates will, of course, speak to everyone.  I cam easily imagine Kim’s Convenience achieving success not just in Toronto but in any of North America’s major cities.                                  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Esther Jun and Paul Sun-Hyung Lee. ©2012 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.