Appa can’t stand the illegally parked white Honda outside his corner store, Kim’s Convenience. This is a running thread throughout Ins Choi’s “Kim’s Convenience,” the play and not the store within the play, now on at American Conservatory Theater’s Toni Rembe Theater through Oct. 19.
This white Honda is the recipient of Appa’s unrelenting ire, yet the person who hears about it the most is not the driver, but Appa’s daughter, Janet (Kelly Seo). This is par for the course, as Janet hears about more of Appa’s complaints than anybody who actually provokes him, but don’t let that fool you into thinking he won’t chew out whoever he sees fit for a chewing. So goes the complicated push and pull at the center of Choi’s uproarious and touching play.
A figure familiar to anyone with a family, Appa’s bristly affection and warm jabs drive “Kim’s Convenience” at its funniest and most bittersweet moments alike. Choi, who also plays Appa, infuses his play with tangible pathos in his writing and performance. In Appa, Choi has constructed a character whose edges don’t define him, but function as an outward construct for a man whose path to his current life, as seen in the short timespan of this one-act play, has been arduous and who needed to figure out a way to persevere.
“Kim’s Convenience” revolves around Appa, a senior Korean man and first-generation immigrant to Canada who runs the titular store in Toronto with his wife Umma (Esther Chung). Janet is 30 and an aspiring photographer, despite her dad’s hopes and dreams of more professional success, and she bears the brunt of her dad’s frustrations after Jung (Ryan Jinn), her older brother of two years, ran away and only speaks to Umma. The play follows a day in the life of this family while a rotating cast of Black characters including Alex, Jung’s old friend who is Janet’s longtime crush, played by the same actor (Brandon McKnight), circle in and out of the shop delivering good news, bad news and just plain news to the family as they come to long overdue understandings.
With a central premise loaded with cliches, it’s a joy to watch Choi and his cast subvert expectations throughout “Kim’s Convenience.” The natural joy they manage to extract from each other is heartwarming to watch and each cast member’s comedic timing is perfectly precise. Watching them bounce off each other is as satisfying as a perfectly calibrated Rube Goldberg machine going off without a hitch. Yet, their chemistry is never mechanical. The cast is equally well-suited to the show’s heavier moments between parents and children, with Choi and Seo at the center of it all.
Terse dynamics between first-generation immigrant parents and their children are well-worn paths mined for dramatic tension, but Choi’s writing doesn’t often veer down those old, reliable paths. Instead, he explores the tensions between generations through comedy. Appa and Janet’s exchanges are always loaded with history that the audience is slowly let in on, but the rocky dynamic between them is elucidated through perfect comedic routines to warm the audience up. That white Honda gets its very own standout run, which outlines exactly who Appa and Janet are as people and to each other.
McKnight’s juggling act as four very different characters in the neighborhood is something special to watch, especially in his moments as Alex with Seo’s Janet. The shared past they have, one from the same generation, is charged with both tenderness and awkwardness, which Appa hilariously cuts through at every chance he gets. Yet, in the gamification of character dynamics for laughs, Choi smartly lays these characters’ inner worlds out and knows when to pull back as a performer or when to punch in for maximum effect.
Those heavier moments come in waves. Janet is fed up with her life looking after her parents or feeling like she has to pull double duty to make up for Jung’s absence, which hangs heavy over the family. She and Appa butt heads a lot, often over silly mishaps which can either land as jokes or turn dramatic on a dime. On the other hand, Jung and Umma’s complicatedly sweet dynamic is one without as many spikes, yet that history isn’t resolved easily either.
By the madcap, somewhat slapstick conclusion, the play feels as if it may end on an ambiguous yet satisfactory note of resolution. However, Choi’s emotionally intelligent script builds to a more thorny and compelling ending that tiptoes to the edge of sentimentality, but settles for an unspoken acknowledgement that’s far richer. The same is true of much of this show. Where the easy road could be taken, it rarely is, for Choi respects his audience too much for that and, one could sense, gets too much glee himself out of prodding harder for the more rewarding path.
