Soulpepper to start 2012 with new play about Toronto

Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre Company will stage its first full-length original play in the 2012 season, a work about Toronto developed in its own training workshop.

An expanded version of Ins Choi's Kim's Convenience, which was a hit at this summer's Toronto Fringe Festival, will launch Soulpepper's 15th season. Set in a Regent Park convenience store,the play follows a fractured but loving family confronting the future and forgiving the past.

Choi was a member of the Soulpepper Academy, a year-long residency to help train theatre artists aged 22 to 26.He also won the Fringe New Play competition. Part of the prize included a mounted production, which is howKim's Convenience was briefly staged at the Fringe.

However, Soulpepper artistic director Albert Schultz says he knew he wanted to produce it, too.

"This very funny, insightful and touching play was written during Ins' time here at the Academy and marks an astonishing debut for this multi-talented Canadian artist," Schultz said in a press release Tuesday.

Soulpepper was formed 15 years ago with a mission to mountclassic plays, including Canadian works. But it has also widened its mandate to include acommitment to plays about Toronto, because of itswork with young artists who have a fascination with the city they live in, Schultz said.

In 2009, the company mounted Civil Elegies and, in 2011, Window on Toronto, both works about the city.

The second play of the 2012 season is also Canadian.High Life, a 1995 comedy by Lee MacDougall, follows four morphine addicts in a Toronto apartment as they attempt to plan a robbery.

The season will also include:

• Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill.
• You Can't Take It with You by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.
• Home by David Storey.
• Speed-the-Plow by David Mamet.
• The Sunshine Boys by Neil Simon.
• The Royal Comediansby Mikhail Bulgakov.
• The Crucible by Arthur Miller.
• Death of a Salesmanby Arthur Miller.
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by Michael Shamata.
• Endgame by Samuel Beckett.

Endgame is a chance to revisit a past success, Schultz said.

In 1999, director Daniel Brooks created a production of Samuel Beckett's play. He's on board for the 2012 production, which will feature a new design and a mostly new cast.