Kim’s Convenience
Citadel Theatre, Shoctor Stage
through Oct. 11, 2014
Tickets $30 to $84, www.citadeltheatre.com

(Touring show, produced by Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre Company)

Review by GRAHAM HICKS

I’m not sure what Kim’s Convenience says about the current state of Canadian theatre.

It’s a lightweight, superficially charming, one-dimensional, 90-minute piece of theatre that I most closely relate to lightweight, superficial, lame CBC-TV  sitcom comedies like Little Mosque on the Prairie, i.e. paying lip service to “Canadian” themes without any semblance of artistic, philosophical or emotional depth.

Yet Kim’s Convenience has been a hit in Canadian theatrical terms, starting as a Toronto Fringe Festival star show in 2011, winning a pile of Toronto theatre awards, touring the country, and being optioned for a TV series. (If it’s not the CBC, I’ll eat my hat.)  Is there such a lack of contemporary Canadian play competition that this one gets such attention?

Even here in Edmonton, home to the most sophisticated of theatre audiences, Kim’s Convenience earned a standing ovation on opening night at the Citadel Theatre!

The show charms its audiences. It’s easy. It milks every scene for laughs and has some cute, if completely unbelievable, physical humour.

It pays lip service to interesting Canadian themes of multi-culturalism, immigrant experience, urban development, inter-generational conflict, aging.

But it skips along the surface, never gets under its characters’ skins and has no structural underpinning.

Yes, yes, the domineering Korean dad and convenience store proprietor Appa is a character – a King of Kensington or an oriental Archie Bunker.

Actor Paul Sun-Hyung Lee makes the most of what he’s given by the author, but the script doesn’t concern itself about why Appa has become the way he is. It just wants to find the laughs.  Jung – the son – cleared out years ago as a teenager after a confrontation with his father. But that’s all we get, just a device to set up the family estrangement – nothing about the father’s inner demons.

The whole show is of stereotypes – Appa is stereotyping personified. The daughter is the entitled artist offspring of a hard-working immigrant who doesn’t understand her. The mother is patience and piety personified, the estranged son’s a loser because he got in problems with the law (which of course was caused by his lack of relationship with his dad).

This show didn’t start with the people. It started with the desire of the playwright to build the cute I-chase-you-with-meat-cleaver humour into the main character, and then, if there’s time, poke at its humanity.

I can best illustrate the banality of Kim’s Convenience by comparing it with two other Canadian ethnic shows, the hit movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and the brilliant psychological insight of Scorched, by Lebanese-Canadian author Wajdi Mouawad.

Not only was My Big Fat Greek Wedding hilarious in its integration of a White Anglo Saxon Protestant into a sprawling Greek immigrant culture and family, the movie was intensely, achingly human.

Scorched was mysterious, centred about second-generation children unable to fathom their mother’s behaviour and despair, until learning through flashbacks what the mother had been through in the old country.  Scorched was beautifully written, its unfolding poetic, its take on this particular – and very individual - immigrant condition profound.

By comparison, Kim’s Convenience is clichéd, finds little humanity. You don’t get to know daughter Janet, the plot is too busy setting up the father-daughter jibs.  You never witness the heartbreak of momma Umma over Jung’s estrangement from his dad – she’s too minor a figure and Appa’s blustering humour must be more fully exploited. Jung is only in the show as a stereotype of the prodigal son. And, at the end, the father-son reconciliation is trite, again not believable and not a worthy ending to the play.

If you go to Kim’s Convenience, you’ll laugh a lot, appreciate the racial and ethnic bantering, enjoy the way Sun-Hyung Lee has nailed Appa.

But you’ll leave with a slight, ill-defined sense of something not being complete.

Why? Because while Kim’s Convenience is offered up as insight into the human condition through the Canadian first/second generation immigrant experience, it’s really nothing more than a glorified, superficial TV sitcom comedy put to the stage.