Kim's Convenience Opens Everyman Theatre's Season with Laughter, Heart, and a Corner Store Worth Fighting For

Everyman Theatre is kicking off its 2026/2027 season, the first under new Artistic Director Brandon Weinbrenner, with Ins Choi's Kim's Convenience, and it is the kind of opener that sets a high bar for everything that follows. Presented in a co-production with Indiana Repertory Theatre and Portland Center Stage and directed by cara hinh, the show runs through September 27, 2026, at Everyman's home on West Fayette Street in Baltimore's Bromo Arts District.

Many audiences will know the title from the beloved Netflix sitcom it inspired, but Choi's original 2011 play is its own animal, a tight, one-act slice of life set inside a family-run convenience store in Toronto's Regent Park. The store belongs to Mr. Kim, known to everyone as Appa, a proud, stubborn, endlessly resourceful Korean immigrant and former schoolteacher who built the business from nothing and has run it for decades alongside his steady, churchgoing wife, Umma. Their daughter Janet, a thirty-year-old aspiring photographer, still works the counter while trying to figure out what she actually wants from her life. Their son Jung walked out sixteen years ago after a violent falling-out with his father, and his absence hangs over the family like weather.

The neighborhood around the store is changing fast. Condos are going up, a big-box retailer is on the way, and a local real estate developer arrives with an offer to buy the shop that would let Appa retire in comfort. To Appa, though, selling the store means erasing the story of his life, and he would rather hand the keys to Janet, whether or not she wants them. That tension, between a parent's dream and a child's own path, between legacy and letting go, drives the play through its swift running time of roughly eighty to ninety minutes with no intermission.

What makes this production land so well is how deftly it balances the comedy with the ache underneath it. The laughs come quickly and often. An early debate between Appa and Janet about how to tell which customers are likely to steal is one of the funniest sequences on any local stage this fall, and a running gag involving Appa's physical "takedowns" of unsuspecting visitors, choreographed by fight and intimacy director Lewis Shaw, has audiences roaring. But the same play that has you laughing at Appa's blunt, half-serious warnings about Janet's expiration date as a marriage prospect will, minutes later, deliver a blistering confrontation in which a father's disappointment and love pour out of him all at once. Those moments hit hard and linger well after the lights come up.

Tony K. Nam, a member of Everyman's Resident Company, anchors the show as Appa, and it is a performance of remarkable range. He is bold, funny, and exasperating in one breath and devastatingly vulnerable in the next, and his late scene with his estranged son, in which he explains that a parent can be angry and heartbroken and still proud, is a tearjerker of the best kind. Jenny S. Lee is equally compelling as Janet, giving the character a sharp, sarcastic edge that never tips into cruelty, and the sparring between the two of them, whether they are bickering across the counter or secretly dancing to music they think no one can hear, feels completely lived-in. Their scenes together are the beating heart of the evening.

Tuyết Thị Phạm, also of the Resident Company, has less time on stage as Umma, but her presence steadies the entire play, and a brief flashback to the family's early years lets her show just how much this woman has carried. Jae Woo does not appear until late in the story, yet Jung has been so thoroughly described by then that his actual arrival is a startling and moving surprise, and Woo finds a whole universe of regret, conflict, and hope in a handful of lines. Rounding out the company is Austin Michael Young, who plays four different characters, including Janet's charming love interest Alex, so convincingly that it takes a moment to realize it is the same actor each time.

The physical production is a marvel in its own right. Yoon Bae's set is an astonishingly detailed recreation of a fully stocked corner store, so lived-in and universal that it could just as easily be a shop in Baltimore or New York as one in Toronto. You could spend the entire pre-show just reading the shelves. Kat C. Zhou's lighting completes the illusion with buzzing fluorescent tubes, then pulls off a quiet bit of magic by transforming the store into a church with nothing more than a shift of glow and a single cross of light, without a piece of scenery ever moving. David Burdick's costumes help Young's quick changes land, Phillip Gerard Johnson's sound design gives the evening a lyrical undercurrent, and dialect coach Joy Lanceta Coronel ensures that the generational divide between the immigrant parents and their Canadian-born children is audible in every exchange.

Under hinh's direction, the whole thing moves with an easy, natural rhythm, never rushed but never slack, with the humor arising from character rather than from setups and the drama building without ever feeling forced. The result is a love letter to first-generation immigrants and to the families they build, and one that will resonate with anyone who has ever argued with a parent about what their life is supposed to look like. It is hilarious, it is tender, and it is one of the most satisfying nights of theatre the region has seen this year.

Kim's Convenience plays through September 27, 2026, at Everyman Theatre, 315 West Fayette Street, Baltimore, MD.