In Aurora Theatre’s marginal staging of “Kim’s Convenience,” directed by Rebecca Wear (“Hometown Boy” at Actor’s Express), Vancouver-based James Yi comfortably inhabits the leading role, fittingly for an actor who has already portrayed the character in various other productions around Canada.

Credit: Casey Gardner Ford

Credit: Casey Gardner Ford

Appa’s tips on product placement or spotting shoplifters is mostly lost on his glorified part-time clerk — his anglicized daughter, Janet, an aspiring professional photographer supposedly in her 30s, although Caroline Donica opts to depict her as some sort of a spunky teenybopper. Elsewhere, Yingling Zhu is burdened with the underwritten part of Umma, the wife and mother of the Kim family, who spends a lot of her time at a church that’s on the verge of closing due to its dwindling congregation.

Rounding out the cast: Ryan Vo (reuniting with director Wear from “Hometown Boy”) is Jung, Appa’s estranged son, who inevitably returns to make amends, vaguely addressing his criminal record and sharing snapshots of his own young son; and a versatile Lamar K. Cheston plays a couple of customers, in addition to Janet’s prospective love interest, a policeman and former childhood crush of hers.

Credit: Casey Gardner Ford

Credit: Casey Gardner Ford

Appa is eventually forced to contemplate an “exit plan,” after a slick real-estate developer (Cheston again) makes him an offer to buy the small convenience store, in anticipation of the planned opening of a big Walmart nearby. Soon, Appa ponders at one point, “What is my story? This store is my story, and if I just sell it, my story is over.” Suffice to say, in the sentimental interest of keeping his legacy alive, the plot quickly develops in a convenient and utterly predictable fashion.

Wear’s Aurora show earns a few higher marks on the design front, beginning with yet another outstanding set by scenic designers Isabel and Moriah Curley-Clay (essentially one-upping their work on Horizon’s “Citizens Market” several years ago). For an otherwise relatively superfluous flashback scene, projections across the top of the set cleverly display time-lapsed street and sidewalk traffic in reverse, and then appear again in forward motion to return the story back to the present.

As a courtesy for Korean-speaking members of the audience, all of the play’s predominant English dialogue is accompanied by Korean supertitles in that same strip above the stage. English-speaking viewers, on the other hand, aren’t extended a similar courtesy during isolated conversations between Appa and Umma that are delivered entirely in Korean.

Not that it really matters, in the end. There isn’t very much of a challenge in catching the basic drift of “Kim’s Convenience,” when, as it turns out, if we’ve seen one play about dysfunctional family dynamics, evidently we’ve seen them all anyway.

THEATER REVIEW

“Kim’s Convenience”

Through Feb. 19. 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays. $18-$50. Aurora Theatre, 128 E. Pike St., Lawrenceville. 678-226-6222, auroratheatre.com.

Bottom line: Stories and characters can be formulaic and one-dimensional, whatever their racial or cultural specifics.