"A corner store is a ripe setting for theater, a place where people of different walks of life pass through, where the familiar rhythms of a neighborhood play out, and where people might stop to chat with each other or to a longtime store owner who has become like a friend. Dramedies like and have made similar use of beauty parlors and films like Spike Lee's used a pizza parlor to illustrate how racial tensions simmer until they explode."
"Playwright Ins Choi uses his setting, a downtown Toronto corner store called , to tell a perfectly simple, concise story about the man who runs it, Mr. Kim (played by Choi himself), known to his children as Appa, and the wife he moved to Canada with three decades earlier for a better life. Whether they found a better life or not is hard to say Mr. Kim was a successful and well liked teacher back in Korea, and in Canada he is just a shopkeeper."
A downtown Toronto corner store becomes the stage for a concise, affecting story about Mr. Kim, an immigrant who runs the shop and is known to his children as Appa. He moved to Canada three decades earlier with his wife seeking a better life; he had been a successful teacher in Korea and now works as a shopkeeper. The play highlights neighborhood rhythms, passing strangers, and small interactions, touches on racial tensions in North American cities but avoids centering conflict, and shows how community, identity, sacrifice, and cultural change shape immigrant experience.
Read at sfist.com
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