Originally written 20 years ago and first performed 14 years ago, leading to a popular Canadian TV show adaptation, Kim's Convenience remains a funny and powerful piece of theater about the immigrant experience.

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 JaJa's African Hair Braiding and Steel Magnolias have made similar use of beauty parlors — and films like Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing 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 Kim's Convenience, 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. But the Kims were part of a long wave of Korean immigration to North America in the 1970s and 80s, with many seeking out better job opportunities here and better lives for their children. Many, like Mr. Kim, ended up owning retail businesses in major cities.

In Los Angeles, tensions between Korean store owners and the Black population boiled over during the Rodney King riots of 1992 — though some have argued in recent years that those tensions were overblown by the media. And seeing the first couple of Black characters (all played by the brilliant Brandon McKnight) come through the door in the opening scene of Choi's play, it's easy to jump to the conclusion that racial tension will be at play here.

But that isn't where Kim's Convenience takes us. Sure, Mr. Kim does his share of racial profiling — as he tells his daughter in a "lesson" about running the store, A Black man with a jean jacket is likely going to steal, while a gay man or a Black woman are not going to steal. As "awkwardly racist" as all that is, according to daughter Janet (Kelly J. Seo), Mr. Kim has no ill will and no real bias, as we learn — except toward Japan — and no big dramas are set to unfold with the neighbors.

What transpires is something quieter but no less emotionally explosive. Over the course of a day, we see the store owner yearning to pass on his legacy, such as it is, to his daughter, who wants nothing to do with it, and struggling with how to figure out his own "exit plan" from his one small life. And if that sounds like it enters melodramatic or heavy-handed theater territory, it doesn't — Choi's play takes a pretty light touch with big ideas, and therein lies its power.

His wife (played by Esther Chung), is affable enough, goes to church, and wishes her daughter would settle down and get married. And an estranged son, Jung (Ryan Jinn), occasionally finds her there at her church — the last Korean church in downtown Toronto, already slated for demolition — to check in. They're an imperfect yet entirely real family, and their struggles are poingnant without feeling clichéd.

Kim's Convenience is like a masterclass example in one-act playwrighting. Coming in at a tight 85 minutes, it takes the audience on a remarkable number of emotional arcs and through several uproariously funny sequences, without a wasted beat. That may be in part thanks to the efficient direction by Weyni Mengesha, though the economy of the writing deserves much of the credit.

This production, with Choi reprising the title role, is a revival by Soulpepper, the Toronto theater company that originally staged the premiere, and its stop at ACT is part of a North American tour. It seems certain to wow and delight audiences wherever it goes.

'Kim's Convenience' plays through October 19. Find tickets here.