By Robert Israel

Kim’s Convenience offers a genial comic glimpse of an immigrant family’s struggle for dignity and an economic foothold.

Kim’s Convenience, a one-act play by Ins Choi. Directed by Weyni Mengesha. Adam Blanshay Productions presents the Soulpepper Theatre Company production in association with American Conservatory Theater. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Calderwood Pavilion, 527 Tremont St., Boston, through November 30.

Ins Choi and Esther Chung in Kim’s Convenience (2025). Adam Blanshay Productions presents the Soulpepper Theatre Company production in association with the American Conservatory Theater. Photo: Dahlia Katz

Daily life for immigrants is full of rancor and uncertainty. Armed with truncheons, handcuffs, and automatic weapons, and funded with a fat purse of a staggering $170 billion, ICE agents are rounding up men, women, and children, detaining and deporting them — even before determining their actual legal status — to detention facilities. Although the current use of repugnant brute force is not mentioned in this uneven production of Kim’s Convenience — which gingerly tap-dances around these and other pressing issues — the evening nevertheless fills a glaring void on our local stages. Kim’s Convenience offers a genial glimpse of an immigrant family’s struggle for dignity and an economic foothold, and this is a welcome sign.

Kim’s Convenience, it should be noted, is a comedy/drama that began as a play, became a television sitcom, and morphed into a popular Netflix series. The stage script has traveled to off-Broadway, across the US, and to the UK. Set in a gentrified neighborhood in Toronto, the staging, which runs around 80 minutes, comes off as an in-person television production. All that is needed to make the TV experience complete is the use of mobilized video cameras, dollies, grips, and microphones.

The set design by Joanna Yu effectively takes us into a Korean mini-market, where the shelves are stocked with plastic items, canned food, gewgaws, and commemorative Canadian and Korean flags. Above the store’s open roofline, one views the towering city of Toronto itself, where projections of actual immigrant families appear — a peek at neighbors who, we learn, have not been frequenting the store as often as the owners need.

Playwright Choi plays Appa, the paterfamilias, who teeters and totters about the set like a disheveled and quarrelsome Mister Rogers spouting neighborhood gossip, bits of Korean history, and petty complaints. His wife, Umma (Esther Chung), portrays the stereotyped healing maternal force, but she makes only fleeting appearances. A daughter Janet (Kelly Seo) helps out at the store, too, when she’s not flirting with policeman Alex (Brandon McKnight). The family also includes an estranged son, Jung (Ryan Jinn). The story is saccharine and sketch-comedic: disclosures of racial prejudices are accompanied by fears of encroaching gentrification. (A Walmart is being planned for the neighborhood, a real estate agent is looking to buy Appa’s store, and there are other issues of urban peril in the offing.)

The performances are solid throughout, and the sparks between Janet and Alex are especially well struck, memorably conveying the first stirrings of love. Because the play derives from a television format, nothing is ever developed too deeply (you have to tune in next week, folks, for the next episode). But that seems to be the growing preference for theaters these days: keep it short, quick, and play it for the laughs.

Still, I’ll take this semisweet production as a hopeful possibility that we might get real dramatics on stage, the kind in which we won’t have to subscribe to Netflix in order to keep up with the antics. Having grown up in an immigrant family myself, I know only too well how humor often competes with despair when people are confronted with inequities and hatreds that could sweep them away at any time. But for the laughs in a sketch comedy like Kim’s Convenience to ring true, there must be more of a focus on real perils. More news, less Netflix.

Robert Israel, an Arts Fuse contributing writer since 2013, can be reached at risrael_97@yahoo.com.