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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In Basic Training, the impressively multi-character solo play currently running as part of the Edmonton Fringe Theatre season, Khalil Ashanti tells a fascinating story.

It is his own. It’s the story of a childhood terrorized by an abusive ‘father’, and a kid who escapes to find another family — by joining the American military and finding a gift for stand-up comedy. It’s also the story of a man who finally discovers his real roots, hitherto shrouded in mystery, and returns home to reclaim his family and re-write the ending.

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The title is double-sided. Basic Training is named both for the official boot camp that reduces people to nothingness and turns them into  soldiers — and for the domestic boot camp from which, in the end, it’s much harder to graduate. And Ashanti, a winsome and comically dexterous performer, populates both with some 23 characters — of all ages, sexes, persuasions, ethnicities, voices, accents.

The night before he leaves for boot camp, Ashanti’s mother tells him casually, in passing, that the violent man who has persecuted both of them forever isn’t his biological father.  And this knowledge haunts him through a career in the American military that includes getting chosen for Tops in Blue, the touring Air Force entertainment unit.

The fabric of the show is Ashanti’s high-speed, inventively physical, comic portraiture of the characters he meets in the course of basic training and his graduation into Tops in Blue in the 1990s. The furiously foul-mouthed drill sergeant, who practically levitates on the jet stream of his own highly original scatology, a figure familiar in American film, TV, and theatre, is heightened into comedy in Ashanti’s performance. And we meet Ashanti’s new pals, one with Tourette’s Syndrome, one with a flamboyant flounce, en route to a happy ending. It’s a journey interspersed with phone calls back home to his mom, a sympathetic figure trying to survive an impossible home regime.

The audition scene, in which he and other hopefuls, wildly varied in their talents, try out for Tops in Blue, is a lot of fun. Race is a recurring focus for Ashanti’s humour (the Black analysis of pool as an inherently racist game, vis-à-vis the supremacy of the white ball, is inspired). After all, as one character points out, it’s no coincidence that Black History Month is February, the shortest month of the year. And the most dangerous part of their world tour, not surprisingly the Middle East, snatches comedy from extreme danger — a busload of Black performers trading Black jokes, and a bus driver who pushes his luck. Always at the back of Ashanti’s mind is the thought of a dad, somewhere, identity unknown.

Perhaps the boldest, and certainly the uneasiest, idea of Basic Training is to intertwine in quick-change back-and-forth scenes, the brute of a drill sergeant and the brute tyrant of a step-father. The one is designed to be comic (the cornerstone of basic training seems to be verbal insults inflated to a fine art), and the other, detailing child abuse, horrifyingly not. This back-and-forth structure creates a disturbing equivalence; it places both characters on the same spectrum of violence. This structure, for me problematic, ups the stakes for Ashanti’s coming-of-age triumph, true, but in the process seems to let the abusive step-father off the hook somewhat; is he just the domestic version of a drill sergeant? It’s an idea that would seem to invite further exploration, beyond the scope, perhaps, of a 60-minute show.

In any case, Ashanti’s expertise in multi-character storytelling is enhanced by the fact that it happens on a bare stage. One man, one chair: what could be more quintessentially Fringe? That’s where this live show, with its zest for cameo captures, was born, as a 2004 production that was a hit in Montreal, has played other Fringes, including Edinburgh, since. The creation of a world, through solo performance, is a specialty of Fringes; so is the personal quest for identity. And there is no denying Ashanti’s protean talents. And, structural oddities notwithstanding, this is an unusual show, unafraid of sentiment, in which comedy and tragedy mingle and any happy ending is hard won.

REVIEW

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