Kahlil Ashanti, creator and star of Basic Training. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The 23 characters who we meet at the Fringe’s Backstage Theatre Friday in Basic Training — conjured by a particularly agile playwright/ performer/ comedian — have taken an unusually circuitous route to get here.

They’ve crossed borders, continents, oceans. Like their engaging creator they know, in a vivid way, the value of laughter. The characters who populate Kahlil Ashanti’s hit solo show live in a real-life story, on a spectrum that includes hilarity and heartbreak, violent abuse and redeeming creativity.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

“Survival,” says Ashanti succinctly of his entry point into showbiz, which came via Tops in Blue, the elite U.S. Air Force entertainment troupe. On the phone from Vancouver, his home base, he explains that his was the peripatetic childhood of a kid in an American military family. Born in Germany, where he lived till age three, he was in Japan till he was 11 or 12, and after that, he grew up in Davenport, Iowa.

“For a lot of American kids who aren’t rich, college isn’t an option,” he says of his younger self. “In the U.S. a university education is at least 10 times what it is in Canada.” Besides, “the military was the family business,” and signing up “was a way to make my dad proud.”

The night before he left for basic training, Ashanti’s world fractured. t“I have my escape plan. It’s 1992. It’s Davenport, Iowa. And six days after high school graduation I’m finally leaving!” And that’s when it happens. “My mother sees fit to let me know, ‘by the way the guy who’s been beating the shit out of you for as long as you can remember isn’t your real dad. I told you before; you probably just forgot’…. And that’s the beginning of the show!”

Ashanti hadn’t been a ‘performing arts kid’, he says. “That stuff costs way too much…. I played football, I ran track, but I was never really great at sports. Which is decidedly inconvenient when you’re Black and in Davenport, Iowa.” So, to return to his origins as a performer, “survival!” was the operative concept.

He describes being made to stand at attention overnight with his little brother, a belt across their feet, as their step-dad slept on the couch. “Because we’d done something wrong.” Like “I’d forgotten to paint the bottom of the rocks green.” The stepdad as an army man “insisted that everything be uniform. So the rocks around the edge of the lawn had to match the colour of the grass. That was one of my jobs.”

“If we were to move, the belt buckle would make a noise and we’d get a beating…. Crying was the ultimate betrayal. So if my brother started crying, I’d do impressions of my step-dad. Quietly. To make him laugh. Quietly.”

Though he can’t have known it at the time, a career was getting planted in this thorny home soil. “Helping other people forget about their pain was the first time I remember having a feeling of self-worth,” Ashanti says. And that feeling was duplicated at school in the ‘80s. “People would be in pain and I’d do my Eddie Murphy impression…. And then I got invited to do a talent show at school.”

Kahlil Ashanti, creator and star of Basic Training. Photo supplied

There was no conventional theatre education about this, needless to say, Ashanti laughs. When the Funny Bone Comedy Club opened in Davenport, “I was able to take this weird talent I have (forward)…. I got the opportunity to open for people like Jamie Fox,” and other alumnae of the In Living Color sketch comedy show, he says. “That was my high school job, performing at the Funny Bone, and I was able to hone my craft in a real way that wasn’t a performing arts school…. My friends weren’t old enough to get in because they served alcohol.”

Another eye-opener was “growing up seeing Eddie Murphy…. What? Comedians can be actors?” A revelation, and it came “much to the chagrin of my mother,” who’d envisaged her kid, who had a knack for drawing, becoming an architect, with all the perqs. But “the performing bug had caught me.”

Kahlil Ashanti (right) and a Tops in Blue cohort “somewhere on tour.” Photo supplied.

When Ashanti got out of the military, he performed as a magician, in Japanese, at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas for three years. And then, “lo and behold,” he moved to L.A. And he did what showbiz hopefuls have always done, he took an acting class. What we’re going to see, in Basic Training, Ashanti says, is “the result of a storytelling exercise in Jeffrey Tambor’s acting class . where you’d have to come onstage and tell a story, the only stipulations being that the character leaves the story knowing something they didn’t know at the beginning.”

The early version of Basic Training “was just the funny parts; I didn’t have any of the abuse in there, the domestic violence,” Ashanti says. “Jeffrey pushed me to remind people, through my writing, the price I’d paid….”

“So I was living in L.A. And I couldn’t get hired to save my life,” he says. “I was going to have to figure it out on my own, and create my own opportunities. Of necessity.” And that’s where the Canadian Fringe circuit enters the Ashanti story, thanks to one of his classmates in Tambor’s acting course.

He took Basic Training, then called Father’s Day, to the Montreal Fringe in 2004, where it scooped up an impressive assortment of awards and ticket sales stats, and closed on … Father’s Day. And it played the Vancouver Fringe, too, an experience that comes with its own network of connections. Ashanti has remained a close friend of the Canadian Fringe stars master storyteller T.J. Dawe, and soloist Charlie Ross (of One-Man Star Wars Trilogy fame).

Ashanti has since taken Basic Training to the Off-Broadway Barrow Street Theater in NYC; he’s taken it to Australia; he’s taken it to the Edinburgh Fringe twice. And he’s signed a movie deal, too. Meanwhile he moved to Canada, to Vancouver. “It always seemed to come up in any of the lists of the five best places in the world to live” that he researched in the library. And, as he says, it was lot more accessible than Auckland or Bern.

The Fringe experience has inspired Ashanti in practical ways, too. He’d started Javascript coding in 1998 to support himself, and turned this expertise to creating “a digital pay-what-you-want solution for the arts” in 2018, an app he called We Show Up. “We’re growing up with a generation who have entertainment at their fingertips. And it’s never been harder to get your kids, or anyone under the age of 15, to care about theatre. Their spending habits reflect that…. And I don’t know if theatre can survive it.”

“This generation is used to controlling the narrative. They get to pick what series they’re going to binge today, as many episodes as they want for one price. And I decided to try that with theatre.” The idea of We Show Up (he shut it down when the pandemic descended) is that “you pay a couple of dollars up front, you come and see the show, and as you leave you get a text asking how much you thought the show was worth.” Fringe festivals, he says, “did not pick up on it.”

“I always stand at the exit after the show, and thank everyone who came to see it. And they tell me ‘I would have paid more for that!’.”

PREVIEW

Basic Training

Theatre: Edmonton Fringe Theatre

Created and performed by: Kahlil Ashanti

Where: Backstage Theatre, Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: through April 27

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca