DAHLIA KATZ
Playwright Ins Choi stars in “Kim’s Convenience” at The McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton.
A convenience store is convenient because … well, you can get all kinds of stuff there. Milk or batteries or lottery tickets or toothpaste, and so on.
Appropriately, “Kim’s Convenience” — a one-act, 80-minute play that is currently running at The McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton — offers a kind of one-stop-shopping approach to theater. It weaves together a little comedy, a little romance, a little family drama, a little social relevance.
It is the kind of play you like more than love. I don’t think it is going to blow anyone away. But it does have a certain down-to-earth charm.
The 2011 play, set in a Toronto convenience store, was written by and stars Ins Choi, who has described it as a “love letter to his parents and to all first-generation immigrants who call Canada their home.” It inspired a sitcom that ran on Canada’s CBC Television network for five seasons and has been distributed internationally by Netflix.
Choi played the shop owner’s son Jung in the original Toronto production, but stars as the owner, Mr. Kim — the play’s central role — in this production. Weyni Mengesha, who directed the original production, directs this one, too, with Joanna Yu creating the colorful, cluttered, convincingly realistic convenience store set.
Mr. Kim, called “Appa” by his family, is a hard-working, cranky middle-aged man, with fierce pride, strong opinions, and an appallingly racist way of looking at the world — which he defends as his “survival skill.” (He believes he can tell, just by looking at a person, if they are going to try to shoplift from his store.) He speaks in broken English, or Korean.
Janet (Kelly Seo), his 30-year-old daughter, is still living at home and helping out at the store as she tries to establish a career as a photographer. She seems thoroughly assimilated into Canadian culture — and is unmarried, to the chagrin of her parents.
Jung, Janet’s older brother (Ryan Jinn), has been estranged from Appa for years but is still in touch with his mother, known as Umma (Esther Chung). (“Umma and Appa” are Korean for “Mom and Dad”). Jung works in a dead-end job at a car rental business, and has a recently born child of his own whom Appa doesn’t know about.
DAHLIA KATZ
Brandon McKnight and Kelly Seo in “Kim’s Convenience.”
The cast’s fifth actor, Brandon McKnight, plays four roles: Rich, a Kenyan-born Kim’s Convenience customer; Mr. Lee, a real estate developer who wants to buy the store; Mike, a Jamaican immigrant whom Appa correctly sizes up as a shoplifter; and Alex, a cop who responds to a 911 call that Appa asks Janet to make when there is a Honda in the no-parking zone outside. (Appa hates the Japanese, and this extends to Japanese cars as well.)
It turns out that Alex is an old friend of Jung’s who has fallen out of touch with him. He is also divorced, handsome and sensitive — and someone whom Janet used to have a crush on. He and Janet flirt, awkwardly and adorably — he used to have a crush on her, too, we later learn — and make plans to go on a date.
Meanwhile, long-building tension between Appa and Janet explodes when each expresses resentment to the other about not being appreciated. Also, Appa mulls over Mr. Lee’s offer. It is certainly tempting, but he has worked so hard on the store, for so long. Can he really bear to give it up? He had hoped it would stay in the family, after he retires, but Janet isn’t interested, and Jung is out of the picture.
It is not hard, watching this play, to see how it inspired a sitcom. It has a familiar, sitcom-ish feel to it (even if the setting, an immigrant-run Canadian convenience store, gives it a bit of a sense of newness). The jokes come frequently. The characters aren’t richly three-dimensional, but they are complex enough to hold your interest. Appa eventually softens up on his racism, which makes him more lovable.
Some of the plot twists seem a bit contrived — and the ending, a bit too neat. But once “Kim’s Convenience” has staked out its theatrical territory, you accept all that with a shrug. Sometimes, milk and batteries are all you need.
The McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton will present “Kim’s Convenience” through Feb. 15 at its Berlind Theatre. Visit mccarter.org.
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