“Kim’s Convenience,” an immigrant-family dramedy, is so funny, so heartbreaking, so well-acted—with the playwright, Ins Choi, as the perpetually enraged patriarch—that there’s only one thing missing, but it’s a big thing: believability.
Just like on many a TV series (in fact, you can see “Kim’s Convenience” on Netflix), everything in it, the good, the bad, the ugly, the painful, all happens on one fateful day. Problems are, by chance, resolved, falling neatly into place by the end in a way that never happens in real life. If you can accept that—poetic license, after all—then there’s lots to enjoy in this short (hour and a half) play opening the 2025-26 season at American Conservatory Theater.
An import from Canada that premiered at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2011, it was created at Soulpepper Theatre Company in Toronto (back then, Choi played not the father but the son) and takes place entirely in a beautifully designed and impressively well-stocked convenience store set designed by Joanna Yu.
The plot follows an intense day in the life of the Kim family; Choi based it on his own family and their history of working in convenience stores.
Parents Appa (Choi) and Umma (Esther Chung) are South Korean emigrés to Toronto; their two adult children are Canadian citizens: Janet (Kelly Seo), a photographer who lives at home with her parents, and black sheep son Jung (Ryan Jinn), who had a conflict with his father, spent some time in prison and hasn’t been home since.
On this fateful day, among other things, Appa receives and refuses an offer to buy his store (change is afoot in the neighborhood); an old friend of the outcast brother shows up by chance; conflicts between Appa and Janet turn physical. And more.
Much has been written about North America’s older, immigrant generation of Asians in general, but here Choi, both as an actor and as a playwright, offers fresh insight into one man’s struggle to teach his children well, make a decent living, assimilate. As Appa, he speaks with a Korean accent that is almost impenetrably strong, and, under Weyni Mengesha’s astute direction, channels that difficult character with true empathy. His relentless physical aggression, and his compulsion to forever be giving his frustrated daughter (and anyone else who’s around) life lessons, is surprising, funny, at times appalling.
Seo’s Janet holds her own, confronting her father in ever more surprising and funny ways (although she pushes the comedy a little too hard in Janet’s romantic scenes).
In a delightful touch, a few of the scenes between husband and wife are spoken entirely in Korean. You really don’t need know what they’re saying verbatim, it turns out. Those scenes feel beautifully authentic.
It’s probably evident why Appa, a teacher in his native land, would opt to come to America only to end up running a convenience store. But the way he explains it toward the play’s end makes up for a lot of the TV-sitcom action along the way.
American Conservatory Theater’s “Kim’s Convenience” runs through Oct. 19 at the Toni Rembe Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $25-$130 at act-sf.org/kims/.
The post Review: Lots to enjoy in ACT’s affable immigrant family dramedy ‘Kim’s Convenience’ appeared first on Local News Matters.