Produced by Soulpepper at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts
Returning to Soulpepper after a national tour, Ins Choi’s Kim’s Convenience offers a funny and touching show with surprising pertinence.
This Saturday afternoon, I saw a fine campus production of David Mamet’s Race directed by my friend Danielle Fernandes. In the play, two lawyers – one black and one white – plot their defence of a wealthy white man accused of raping a black woman. The acting was strong. The staging was sensible and unobtrusive. Beyond aesthetic pleasure, the show provided a rare opportunity to reflect on recent events. The somewhat flimsy plot didn’t distract from the important issues at hand and their contemporary antecedents. Racial prejudice. White guilt and white presumption. Black shame and black fury. A compromised justice system. Power and consent. Ferguson. Cosby. Ghomeshi. I appreciated the chance to consider these issues outside of the social media echo chamber. In the hushed, darkened theatre, I felt no need to stake a claim or articulate a position. I could admit my confusion, my fear, my sadness, my anger, my ignorance without being berated. If I couldn’t reconcile my thoughts and feelings, I could at least reconcile myself to them and achieve a more amiable state of discord.
That same evening, Toronto’s Distillery Historic District, transformed for the season into the Toronto Christmas Market, felt like the furthest place on earth from Ferguson, Missouri. Garlands of lights crisscrossed overhead as scads of Christmas shoppers, many of them carrying $12 turkey legs like meaty ice cream cones, milled happily about to soft-rock Christmas carol covers. But Kim’s Convenience, running alongside A Christmas Carol and David Ben’s The Conjuror in the Soulpepper Family Festival, put race on the agenda.
In Kim’s Convenience, Appa Kim, the Korean-Canadian proprietor of the titular convenience store, receives a very generous offer from a developer looking to buy his property. Facing his lack of an “exit plan,” Appa tries to convince his daughter Janet to abandon her aspirations as a photographer and take over the store, thereby keeping his “story” going, all while Appa’s wife Umma meditates on the sale of their local church, and their estranged son Jung confronts his own unhappiness. The unexpected reappearance of Alex, Jung’s childhood friend and now a police officer (one of four black characters played by Andre Sills), catalyzes the family’s crisis, reawakening long-displaced memories in Jung.
There are many ways to appreciate Kim’s Convenience. The script is funny and touching. As a technical achievement, the show exemplifies the maxim “less is more,” from the detailed naturalist set to the restrained and committed performances. As a Christmas show, it’s moving and direct, a deeply Christian play about family, faith, and forgiveness by Ins Choi – one of the few contemporary playwrights to profess belief. But I enjoyed it most as another take on the matter of race.
Kim’s Convenience doesn’t put the issue in the same black-and-white terms as Race, but, instead, focuses on the seldom represented tensions across minorities. In an early scene, Appa, played by Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, teaches Janet to play “steal or no steal,” profiling customers to prevent shoplifting: “Fat black girl is no steal. Fat white guy, that’s steal.” “That is so awkwardly racist,” protests Janet. “Not racist,” says Appa, “survival skill.” In the wake of Michael Brown’s killing, the consequences of such assumptions seem huge, even if Appa’s suspicions are confirmed.
Aside from his unapologetic distaste for everything Japanese, Appa proves a shrewd, discerning, and pragmatic negotiator of racial realities. He can tell whether a black man was born in Kenya or Canada. He gets Janet to call the police because they won’t take his accent seriously. And later, when Janet and Alex connect romantically, Appa tells the story of a Korean convenience store owner from Los Angeles whose generosity to his black customers ensured the protection of his store during the Rodney King riots. “What are you trying to say, Appa?” says Janet. “Alex is not Korean, but if you want to marry him, that’s okay with me,” Appa responds. He may have the temper and stubbornness of an Old Testament patriarch, and he may not be above twisting people’s arms to get what he wants – literally; apparently it’s a Korean fighting style called hapkido – but here, Appa articulates what Mamet’s misanthropic vision quite deliberately leaves out: a theory of love. In the world of Kim’s Convenience, charity, generosity, kindness, and sacrifice can bridge racial divides. That’s the world I choose to believe in.