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When Jean Yoon was an aspiring actor attending high school in North York, she recalls looking at projections of the country’s demographics and thinking of what that might mean for her future acting prospects.
“I remember thinking that when I hit 60 there would be a healthy Asian-Canadian acting scene and I guess that meant I’d be playing lots of grandmothers,” she said.
She hit that milestone age recently. But by then she was famous not for playing a TV grandmother but a TV mom: specifically, Mrs. Kim, or Umma, the devout, hardworking matriarch in “Kim’s Convenience,” which wrapped its five-season run in 2021.
Yoon, a pioneering Asian-Canadian theatre actor, originated the role of Mrs. Kim in the Ins Choi play that preceded the series. After it debuted at Toronto’s Fringe Festival in 2011, and was developed and remounted, it was spun off into the hit CBC sitcom, which reached international audiences — and created scores of rabid fans, called “Kimbits” — through Netflix.
Now Yoon is back onstage for the first time in seven years. She co-stars as the chatty, inquisitive Ginnie in Annie Baker’s “Infinite Life,” about five women (and one man) suffering from chronic pain at a private clinic in Northern California.
“In theatre, with a really good play like this, every word, every punctuation mark has been considered and there’s a reason for it to be there — the playwright’s made a choice,” said Yoon after a recent rehearsal at Coal Mine Theatre.
“There are also these glorious monologues. In film and TV, you don’t get that kind of writing: scenes that are basically driven by one actor. The thing about theatre, too, is you can always make it better. In TV, there are times when you go home and wonder, ‘What if I had done this?’ In theatre, you always have another shot.”
Christine Horne, who plays Sofi — a middle-aged woman whose journey we follow as she takes a water fast and cryptically deals with her personal life — agrees. Horne has starred in a slew of TV and film projects, including a recent supporting turn in “Fellow Travelers,” but says she loves the freedom of being onstage.
“In TV and film, I often feel like I’m going to do something wrong,” she said in the same interview. “I worry if my dress is sitting right or if I smudged my makeup. It’s about continuity and things are often shot out of sequence. Onstage, I feel so much more in my body and free, like I can’t f—k something up.”
Both actors enjoy the fact that Baker’s play deals primarily with older women’s experiences, something you don’t find often in any artistic medium. And while it’s not named in Baker’s 2023 play, the idea of long COVID underscores the work.
“I think long COVID has really made people understand and acknowledge that these illnesses can present differently in different people,” said Horne.
“I think there’s a greater understanding of how complicated it can be and how my ‘autoimmune thing’ doesn’t necessarily look like your ‘autoimmune thing,’ but both can be true. For so long, especially for women, if something was wrong it was often written off as stress or a mental health issue. For too long, women haven’t been heard and believed about what was going on in their bodies.”
Both women are thrilled to be sharing the stage with veteran actors like Nancy Palk, Kyra Harper and Brenda Bazinet, and to be directed by Jackie Maxwell. Yoon points out that more than once they’ve all had conversations that feel like they could have been plucked from Baker’s play.
“We’ll talk about how our mother went through something, or how CBD oil has helped this or that,” said Yoon. “These kinds of conversations are the foundation of so many female friendships, but you never see them depicted in TV or film.”
As for Yoon’s Asian grandmother roles, they’re yet to come. But clearly her work on “Kim’s Convenience” — both the play (which returns to Soulpepper this season) and TV show — is part of a series of long overdue Asian-themed works that includes “Crazy Rich Asians,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “Minari” and “Past Lives.”
I still remember the time 25 years ago when an impassioned Yoon called me at NOW Magazine and informed me that there wasn’t a single Asian actor on a professional Toronto theatre stage that season. There’s no way that would happen today.
“Kim’s was part of the rise of an Asian diasporic creative wave,” said Yoon. “I waited a long time for that to happen.”
“Infinite Life” begins performances Friday and runs to Sept. 29 at Coal Mine Theatre, 2076 Danforth Avenue. See coalminetheatre.com for tickets and information.
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