THEATRE REVIEW:
KIM'S CONVENIENCE

JOHN COULBOURN,
QMI Agency
20 JAN 2012
R: 4/5

Pictured: Esther Jun, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee

TORONTO - While there are many things to celebrate in Ins Choi’s new play, KIM'S CONVENIENCE, it is, finally, the sense of promise that buoys Soulpepper’s winter season opener that rises to the top.

In case you hadn’t heard: After labouring long and hard on his tale of a neighbourhood convenience store and the Korean family it supports, Choi entered his script in the Fringe Festival New Play Contest. Not only did it win, it became the talk of the town in the process, leading Soulpepper (where Ins was enrolled as a member of the Academy) to program it as part of their season, where it opened at the Young Centre Thursday (where it runs through Feb. 11).

Set entirely in the Regent Park store from which it takes its name, the play spans a single day in the life of the family Kim — patriarch Appa (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) who with his wife Umma (Jean Yoon) fled North Korea to make a new life in Canada, and the couple’s two children, daughter Janet (Esther Jun) and son Jung (playwright Choi), from whom the father is estranged.

The store itself is almost a member of the family too, and thanks to designer Ken MacKenzie’s vision (which lacks only a lottery machine to finish things off), it breathes with a life of its own. As day breaks, Appa takes over, humming hymns as he opens his store for yet another, dealing with a desultory array of shoppers, all of them played by the hugely versatile Clé Bennett, who re-appears as a cop who just may be destined to play a pivotal role in the future of the Kim clan.

As the day progresses, Appa is temporarily joined by daughter Janet, who at 30 is an aspiring photographer still living at home and embroiled in a state of loving but exasperated warfare with her domineering father. Yoon’s Umma makes a fleeting appearance as well, a wisp of a woman, all but invisible but clearly strong in the Christian faith that informs the entire family. Slowly, the mystery of the missing Jung emerges then grows, as Appa wrestles against Janet’s independent spirit, attempting to coerce her into taking over the family business. Despite her refusal, he tries to teach her how to stock shelves and, in one very funny scene, how to spot shoplifters.

Yoon’s Umma, meanwhile, comes into her own in a clandestine meeting with her son — a meeting that reveals not only the power of her love, but the quiet desperation that fills Jung’s life as he finds himself trapped in a dead-end job with ever-increasing familial responsibility. But even here, the shadow of the domineering patriarch looms as large as the condo towers that are taking over their neighbourhood.

Under Weyni Mengesha’s direction, the cast is universally strong, but it is Lee who turns in the most accomplished performance, making this curmudgeonly, often racist and abusive, old man an often sympathetic comic character.

It is, in every respect a successful production — but throughout, there lingers the sense that Lee (and indeed Choi himself) hungers to cut a little deeper than what is, at its very best, a sort of Seoul brother to Archie Bunker. There is an almost palpable sense that this is a playwright capable of moving beyond the kind of light entertainment most successful Fringe shows offer, and actually say something deeper and more profound — to actually earn those comparisons to works like Death of a Salesman and All My Sons.

That KIM'S CONVENIENCE falls short of that achievement right now is not a sign of failure, but rather of his success — a promising beginning in what one can only hope will be a long and fruitful journey.