Beloved play that became hit TV show gets revival in Tacoma. ‘It has such resonance ...’

Like millions of others, David Hsieh spent many nights throughout the 2010s binge-watching “Kim’s Convenience” and falling in love with the show. Like many fans, Hsieh (pronounced “shea”) used the show, a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. sitcom about a Korean immigrant family that builds a life in Toronto, to reflect on his own experience as the child of Asian immigrants.

“I just instantly can understand and relate to what [characters] Janet and Jung have to deal with in the show,” Hsieh said. “There’s sort of the experience of being second generation, growing up with parents that don’t necessarily speak the same language the way the rest of the country does. Just having that ethnic barrier, I guess if you want to call it something.”

That’s the extent of most fan’s relationship with “Kim’s Convenience”: Watching the TV show, which now streams its five seasons as reruns on Netflix, and reflecting on it personally or with friends and family. But it is not the path Hsieh chose.

Hsieh has not only further explored the dynamic between the “Kim’s” characters but also provided opportunities for others to share in his experience. He is the co-director of a Tacoma production of the play that the TV show is based on.

“He’s been so integrally involved with the production,” said David Fischer, the Tacoma Arts Live executive director and a co-producer of the show, which opened at Theater on the Square on June 2 and will conclude with four performances this weekend.

The performances, a COVID-postponed continuation of Hseih’s and co-director Scott Nolte’s 2019 Taproot Theatre production in Seattle, reassembles every cast member from the show three years ago.

“It’s been like a family reunion, honestly,” Hsieh told The News Tribune recently. “It was just like revisiting old friends, working again with people I really enjoyed the first time.”

Reuniting the team

The production is a collaboration between Tacoma Arts Live and Taproot. The 2019 Taproot performances of “Kim’s” were billed as the play’s West Coast premier, and it was lauded as one of Seattle’s top plays that year. That cast melted the hearts of many, including Fischer.

“It has such resonance not only for the Korean community but for all other communities,” Fischer said. “Understanding what the immigrant experience is like, and looking particularly at the inter-generational challenges within families that go on for that first generation to the second generation.”

Fischer wanted to bring the cast south and coordinated with Taproot to stage a 2020 production in Tacoma. That arrangement did not happen. Instead, coronavirus replicated copies of itself across the globe, and performing arts centers responded by locking their doors. For its “Kim’s” plan, Tacoma Arts Live scratched the last 0 out of 2020 and eventually replaced it with a 2.

Hsieh, who lives in Seattle, is no stranger to the realities of the theater industry. As a director with dozens of credits, he knew there was no guarantee his original cast and crew would return three years after the first performance series. When Hsieh found out everyone besides the stage management staff was able to return, he was elated and relieved.

“Having to replace any one of them would have been, I mean, not an impossibility, but it just wouldn’t have been the same,” Hsieh said.

Avoiding stereotypes

“Kim’s” playwright Ins Choi emigrated with his family from South Korea to Canada as a baby in 1975 and began writing the “Kim’s” play script in 2005. The play premiered in Toronto in 2012 and was immediately heralded as a success. It won numerous accolades, including the Toronto Theatre Critics Best Canadian Play award.

The play’s acclaim inspired the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. to base a TV show on the production and bring Choi in as its co-creator. Although the TV show averaged nearly a million viewers an episode and catalyzed the careers of actors like Simu Liu, its cast ultimately accused the predominantly white screen writers of developing racist story lines. Jean Yoon, who acted as the Kim family matriarch, wrote in a series of Tweets that Choi had little decision-making power in the show’s later seasons.

Fischer believes that the problems detailed by the TV show’s cast do not extend to the play. To him, while a TV show is forced to constantly produce episodes, a play’s bounded script helps it stay true to its original themes.

“The more they try to repeat the narrative structure that is launched in this play through episode after episode after episode of the TV show, eventually you’re gonna get down into a stereotypical response,” Fischer said. “I’m assuming that’s what happened to the TV show and where some of the criticism is coming from.”

A changed cast

Hsieh and Nolte have tried to avoid stereotypical depictions by making sure the play centers around challenges that Asian immigrant families can face while resettling in a western country. The Kims, a family or four living in Toronto’s Regents Park neighborhood, weather challenges throughout the play, including their son Jung’s decision to estrange himself from his parents. When the curtains close, Jung has reunited with his family, and all four have found ways to coexist with each other’s values.

By all accounts, the Tacoma “Kim’s” cast members have always been fond of each other. But the characters’ feelings of separation, in their case brought on by a global pandemic, were perhaps more relatable three years after the first production. Like them, the actors have grown upon their reunification.

“They’ve learned how to perform in a way that maximizes the audience’s appreciation of it,“ Hseih said. “It’s the subtle way you deliver the line to get a laugh, or the knowledge of what needs to happen to inspire the audience to either laughter or to tears ... you can’t learn that from just reading a play.”

‘Kim’s Convenience’

▪ Where: Theater on the Square.

▪ When: Friday, June 17, at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday, June 18, at 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.; and Sunday, June 19, at 3 p.m.

▪ Run time: 1 hour 25 minutes.

▪ Tickets: Online or at the Tacoma Arts Live box office, open Tuesday through Friday noon-5 p.m.

This story was originally published June 15, 2022 at 5:00 AM.