The play may owe one of its biggest debt to Choi’s church, Grace Toronto (a congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America.  Calling itself “a church for the city in the city,” in highly secular Toronto, the church pledged the rehearsal space and financial support for a weeklong workshop in 2009. With Grace Toronto dollars, Choi hired professional actors to rehearse the script and stage a public reading of the play, a process that proved critical to revising the script and no doubt contributed to its success.

“There’s power in humor. When people laugh, it means they’ve understood something and you’ve made a connection,” says Ins Choi, Toronto actor and playwright. Choi’s debut play, Kim’s Convenience, is sobered by intergenerational conflict, but it is also uproariously funny, not least because Mr. Kim, a belligerent and bull-headed Korean father, takes center stage. [Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]

In the play, which is loosely based on the story of the Prodigal Son, “Appa” runs the family convenience store in Toronto’s gentrifying Regent Park neighborhood. A larger-than-life character and vociferously anti-Japanese, Mr. Kim has added the Toronto police to his speed dial should he spot a Honda illegally parked in front of the store.

“I solifidied Appa early on,” says Choi, whose own family moved from Korea to Toronto when he was a baby. “I knew his voice, I knew him through all the male Korean influences in my life: my dad, my uncles, men at church.”

Korean churches and convenience stores are landmarks of an era of Toronto’s recent history, marking decades of Korean immigration to Canada. But Kim’s Convenience chronicles what may soon be a lost story: as areas like Regent Park revitalize, these churches and variety stores are ceding their place to condo highrises and big-box retailers.

Kim’s Convenience garnered immediate attention in Toronto when it entered, and won, the contest for Best New Play at Toronto’s Fringe Festival in 2011. After its sell-out run at the Toronto Fringe in July 2012, it was picked up by Soulpepper Theatre Company, which has re-extended the show several times and plans to launch its first national tour in January 2013.

Nominated for Toronto’s most prestigious theater honor—a 2012 Dora Award for Outstanding New Play—and hailed by Toronto Theatre Critics as 2012’s Best Canadian Play, Kim’s Convenience is “theater’s rags-to-riches story,” says Choi. When Choi graduated from York University in 1998, Asians were underrepresented in Toronto’s theater landscape. This remains true today, making Choi’s rise the kind of unexpected narrative to capture the imagination of Toronto’s media.

Toronto’s Korean community has received the play warmly as well. One family made a three-hour trek to Toronto at the suggestion of friends, who told them to “close the store and come see this play; it’s about us.” But one doesn’t have to be Korean–or an immigrant–to appreciate a story that rings so familiar. Writes Soulpepper artistic director, Albert Schultz, “The magic depth to which [Choi] has taken this specificity is the same depth from which the play’s universality is sprung. This play, on hearing, becomes our story about our family in our community.”

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