Ins Choi in Kim’s Convenience, a slice-of-life dramedy about a convenience store in Toronto’s Regent Park neighbourhood, now playing at Soulpepper.Supplied
- Title: Kim’s Convenience
- Written by: Ins Choi
- Director: Weyni Mengesha
- Actors: Ins Choi, Ryan Jinn, Kelly Seo, Esther Chung, Brandon McKnight
- Company: Soulpepper
- Venue: Young Centre for the Performing Arts
- City: Toronto
- Year: Until March 2, 2025
Critic’s Pick
Could there be a better time for a play that celebrates Canada in all its messy, nostalgic glory?
When Soulpepper artistic director Weyni Mengesha programmed Kim’s Convenience into the 2024-25 season, she couldn’t have anticipated the present rise of Canadian nationalism, spurred by the threat of tariffs from south of the border.
But she likely knew the production would be among her last at Soulpepper. Mengesha announced last week that she will be leaving the company she helped revitalize in 2018, when she was hired to replace disgraced founding company member Albert Schultz.
Esther Chung, left, and Ryan Jinn in Kim’s Convenience.Supplied
The intervening years have been colourful – Mengesha has steered Soulpepper through a pandemic, a deficit and the aftershocks of the company’s #MeToo scandal – but through it all, Kim’s Convenience has sat in the metaphorical trophy case, a reminder of Soulpepper’s gargantuan legacy within the Canadian theatrical landscape. All Mengesha ever had to do, if her theatre needed a surefire hit, was to pull out the play, dust it off and give it a loving remount.
And here we are. The slice-of-life dramedy about a convenience store in Toronto’s Regent Park neighbourhood, now playing at Soulpepper (and set to tour to San Francisco later this year), is everything theatre should be: well written, well designed, well acted.
But it’s Mengesha’s direction that cloaks Kim’s Convenience in a velvety, sentimental haze. Mengesha makes every artistic choice with sharp attention to detail, from the cat in the window of Joanna Yu’s exquisite set to the varying temperatures of Wen-Ling Liao’s lighting design to the untranslated swathes of Korean dialogue that glide alongside playwright Ins Choi’s English banter.
Brandon McKnight, left, and Kelly Seo in Kim’s Convenience.Supplied
Of course, the production signals a homecoming for Choi, as well. After playing estranged adult son Jung in his runaway 2011 Fringe hit and subsequent runs at Soulpepper in 2012 and off-Broadway in 2017, Choi is now old enough to step into the shoes of patriarch Appa. When Mr. Kim shuffles onstage, humming to himself as he opens the shop for another day of business, it’s hard not to feel like we’re spying on the store through a peephole – the actions feel completely lived-in, and in harmony with the weathered edges of Yu’s set.
Choi’s performance only improves when it’s in concert with the rest of the cast, from Kelly Seo’s blistering take on grown daughter Janet to the tender layers of Esther Chung’s Umma. Prepare to shed a tear or two when Appa and Umma appear onstage in colliding flashbacks about the importance of a given name – it’s one of the most affecting sequences of the production.
The vastest schisms between Choi’s play and its fluffier CBC sitcom adaptation appear in Jung, played with depth and grit by Ryan Jinn, and a series of Black men played by Brandon McKnight. Some of Choi’s jokes about race might feel a tad dated in a worse production – Appa’s propensity for racial profiling is a recurring gag in the play, and a quip about police brutality teeters the line between being funny and glib – but McKnight makes each figure, particularly a Black cop named Alex, feel like a living, breathing person, with stories all their own to uncover.
Ryan Jinn, Esther Chung, Ins Choi, Kelly Seo and Brandon McKnight in Kim’s Convenience.Supplied
Where Kim’s Convenience falters for me, if at all, is in Choi’s script, which I’ve long felt resolves Appa’s various turmoils just a little too neatly. The TV show sort of fixed that problem – by definition, the five-season sitcom had longer to tease out storylines about Appa and Umma’s retirement, Janet’s dating life and Jung’s reconciliation with his father. Onstage, Appa’s 90-minute day-in-the-life feels a bit cramped, but then again, that’s a reasonably accurate snapshot of how it feels to work in customer service, bombarded by stories that interweave with the wire shelves and clackety cash registers.
Since the company’s infancy, Soulpepper has wrestled with its mandate to bring “classic” stories to the stage, a notion loaded with Eurocentric ideas of what dramatic work deserves to survive in the Western tradition. Time and again, Mengesha has redefined what “classic” means to her, and to Soulpepper – over the years, the company has made clear that any story, even that of a dilapidated corner store, can become a classic if it’s told with enough care.
Thanks to Mengesha’s years of thoughtful interrogation into what it means for a play to mature into canonization, Choi’s opus has stood the test of time, a vibrant portrait of what it means to be Canadian. Right on time.
In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)
