Ins Choi’s latest play Son of a Preacherman began as a title without a show.
An award-winning playwright and parishioner at Toronto’s Little Trinity Anglican Church, Choi says the play was born of necessity as much as creativity when Kaitlin Williams, director of Vancouver’s Pacific Theatre, reached out to ask if he had a play that could fill a gap in the theatre’s 2023 schedule. He said he didn’t, and she asked if he wanted to write one.
“Usually, I think I would have said no, because I don’t want to be under the gun to make something and then it turns out poorly and now I’ve got to do this dumb play that I wrote,” Choi says. “But I had faith in her ability to create with me and I wanted to work with her.”
Before the script was even written, Williams needed a title to go on the theatre’s calendar. The two picked Son of a Preacherman from a short story Choi had written, and he got to work adapting it for the stage.
This fall, Choi is bringing the show on a tour that will take it home to the city that inspired it and the church where it was first staged.
Son of a Preacherman is based on Choi’s experience growing up as the son of a Korean-Canadian pastor whose mother had promised God he would become the same—and his journey to working in theatre instead.
“I remember my mom telling me very early on, when I was like five years old, that I was destined to be a preacher, which is a lot of pressure for a five-year-old,” Choi says.
The play sold out an extended run at the Pacific Theatre and will come to Ottawa this September and Toronto in October before returning to Vancouver and Kamloops, B.C. in November.
A deeply personal work
The Rev. Jason Byasee, pastor at Toronto’s Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, a United church in Toronto, had previously reached out to Choi asking how the parish could do more to support the arts, theatre and Choi in particular. Byasee wanted to bring art and theatre into the church, which made it a perfect spot to do a test reading of the play, Choi says.
Choi knew they had something special when he heard the applause at that reading. “The audience response was quite overwhelming,” he says.
The play is a deeply personal work for Choi, inspired by “growing up as a pastor’s kid in a church [and then] struggling as an actor early on, struggling to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life [and] God’s calling on my life.”
Much of that material resonated with audiences in Vancouver, he says. But even while the play was selling out there, he was eager to bring it back to the city that inspired it.
The play is also heavily rooted in Choi’s Korean family background, including a summary of the Korean War, his grandparents’ experience fleeing North Korea to the south, his father’s conversion experience and the family’s immigration to Canada. Choi says his sisters have read the play, but his parents haven’t seen it yet—one more reason why staging it in Toronto will be “kind of a homecoming.”
When it returns, Preacherman will once again be staged at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church using the chancel, sanctum and stained-glass windows as part of the set, he says.
Entertainment and the church
The church might not always be where people look to be entertained, Choi says—especially when it comes to theatre.
Within the church tradition, he says, “There’s a whole history of great music. We have a legacy of great writing, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, poetry, hymn writing. But theatre, although it’s this art form going back to the ancient Greeks, it doesn’t really show up in the church.”
The Middle Ages saw guilds and priests putting on morality plays or staging biblical passages, he adds. “But modern theatre, the church is quite silent on [until] the ’70s, maybe, with the Jesus movement. I’m sure someone could connect the dots more than me.”
Choi doesn’t think of himself as a Christian playwright, specifically. “I like using the term ‘Christian’ as a noun rather than an adjective … I just write what is true to me and to my experience, how I understand the world, how I would like to see the world sometimes.”
People don’t necessarily look to the church to find entertainment, Choi says, nor do they always look to theatres or movies to find meaning.
“People go to theatre to be entertained. And if they learn something, or if their lives are somehow changed by what they see or a story they hear, it lands deeper because they’re so open, because they’re entertained.”
Writing high-quality work means being a student of excellence wherever it’s found in theatre, he adds, and writing with an aim to what makes a good and entertaining story first. That means not restricting one’s research to productions with Christian themes—though Choi’s own convictions mean they often come out in his work, explicitly or not, he says.
Theology student to playwright
Preacherman includes a section chronicling Choi’s time as a theology student at the University of Toronto’s Wycliffe College, where he went to follow through on his mother’s promise he’d become a preacher.
Even during that time, Choi says, he was drawn more to theatre than to academics. “At Wycliffe I was never a good student,” he says. “I’d do what I had to do, but I would be on fire in a good way when I was creating something.”
He tells the story of one of his professors, Marion Taylor, who agreed to let him complete some assignments in the form of short dramas he would write and act out, sometimes with other students.
“Credit to her, she saw the value in theatre [as a] way to digest material and express it in a different way than an essay,” he says.
Choi would eventually step off the path to priesthood, inspired by the appearance of Jesus in a dream to believe that working in theatre was his real calling.
Asked by the Journal whether a theme of the play might be that some of his calling to be a preacher found expression in his theatre career, Choi replies, “I don’t want to give too much away, but every family has their lore.”
