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by Ins Choi, directed by Weyni Mengesha

Soulpepper Theatre Company & American Conservatory Theatre & Adam Blanshay Productions, Young Centre, Toronto

February 6-March 2, 2025

Mr. Kim: “This store is my story”

Kim’s Convenience, Ins Choi’s 2011 Fringe Festival hit that became a CBC and Netflix sitcom, is back on stage. Soulpepper staged the play in 2012 directed by Weyni Mengesha. The company is now staging it again in an entirely new production with a new cast also directed by Mengesha. This time the play is a co-pro with the American Conservatory Theatre of San Francisco where it travels to this fall. If you have somehow never seen the play, be sure to see it now. If you have seen the play before, you will want to see it again.

In 2012 the play was staged in the 207-seat Michael Young Theatre at the Young Centre. This time it is in the Young Centre’s 385-seat Marilyn and Charles Baillie Theatre, reflecting the work’s growth in fame and preparing it to travel to the 1025-seat Geary Theatre in San Francisco. As designed by Joanna Yu, Mr. Kim’s store is much more spacious than the appropriately cramped store of 2012. Behind the walls of the set Yu has constructed suggestions of taller buildings that surround the store. Also, above the walls of the set, Nicole Eun-Ju Bell shows projections that portray family scenes of Korean immigrants, historic photos of other family-owned stores in Toronto (or cities like Toronto) and at one point display stained-glass windows for the play’s one excursion to another location, a church. The taller buildings and the projections already establish the plays themes of family, immigration, faith and change in the city where a family has settled.

Despite having been developed into a television series, the story of the original play remains the same. As I described the store in 2012, “Here we meet Mr. Kim, the store owner as he opens the store in Regent’s Park for business at the start of the day. He and his wife 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 of car parked illegally in front of his store, he makes his daughter Janet 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 tells Kim that once the condos are finished around Regent’s Park, a Walmart 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 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”.

Whether it is a change in how director Weyni Mengesha has approached the play or whether is it simply the fact of seeing the play a second time or a combination of the two, the serious undercurrents of the play now seem much stronger than they did in 2012. In 2012 the play felt like was primarily a comedy and it did not seem at all strange when it was announced in 2015 that CBC Television would develop it into a sitcom. Now, although the play is still very funny, the pain Mr. Kim called Appa or Father and of his wife Umma continue to feel after relocating to a new country is undeniable as is their difficulty in understanding how different from their own lives of their two children have become.

In 2012 it felt that the play had the perfect cast with Ins Choi playing Jung. In 2025 it still feels as if the play has the perfect cast even though Ins Choi now plays Appa and the other members of the ensemble are completely different. Choi’s bluster as Appa may be comic but his Appa seems lost in thought, presumably about the possible demise of his store, and more irritable with outsized, not always comic reactions to simple remarks. Choi’s Appa undergoes a major change in his point of view from believe the store is his story to realizing that his family is his story. What precisely precipitates this change is unclear.

Esther Chung is excellent as Umma, the one person who is kind enough and level-headed enough for Jung to confide in. Kelly Seo is a lively thoroughly modern Janet, whose Canadian accent and up-to-date manner of speech contrast completely with those of her father. Ryan Jinn is very fine as Jung, emphasizing less Jung’s despair at how his life has turned out than Jung’s desire to change.

Brandon McKnight somehow seems to make the four characters he plays feel so distinct it’s to believe only one person is playing all four. McKnight varies his voice placement and body language so completely that it is hard to believe that the polished, GQ-like real estate agent is played by the same person as the suspicious, hoodie-clad young man speaking a nearly impenetrable Jamaican patois. As the policeman Alex, McKnight and Seo make the awkward transition from long-time-no-see to renewed romance one of the most enjoyable aspects of the play.

The play’s theme of gigantic American retailers putting small family-owned shops out of business seems even more relevant than before, as does the concomitant theme of condo developments drastically altering the character of the city. There is much more of a sense in the present production that the new stability that the Kims have found in Toronto is under threat.

The play still seems to end too quickly and easily. The estrangement between Appa and Jung has been so long and bitter that Jung’s passing a Korean history test doesn’t feel as if it is enough to reconcile them. We would that father and son have much more to talk about. Of course, part of the point is that Appa doesn’t like to talk about his feelings. To get this across, Mengesha wisely inserts long pauses between the short lines of dialogue Choi has written so that the characters look like they are considering more than they are willing to say.

Choi writes in his Playwright Note that, “This play is a love letter to them and to all first-generation immigrants who end up making a foreign land, home”. Indeed, it is the compassion Choi feels for all his characters that gives the play such authenticity and has made so many others love the play in return.

A sign of how well Choi has captured the experience, not just of Korean immigrants, but of immigrants in general, is the acceptance the play has received outside of Canada. The play had it European premiere in January 2024 and this year will embark on a tour of the UK. This production is directed by Esther Jun, who played Janet back in 2012. (For more information see www.kimsconvenienceplay.com). At a time when too many nations denounce and reject them, this is a play that open-heartedly makes us see immigrants as people worthy of the highest respect.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Ryan Jinn as Jung, Esther Chung as Umma, Ins Choi as Appa, Kelly Seo as Janet and Brandon McKnight as Alex; Ins Choi as Appa. © 2025 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.soulpepper.ca.