JUSTIN BELL
It's a very personal, yet very funny, story that Kahlil Ashanti brings to the stage with Basic Training.
The one-man show, playing until April 27 at the Backstage Theatre, is both laugh-out-loud funny and could bring a tear to your eye.
As the stage lights come up, Kahlil is preparing to leave home. He has enlisted in the United States Air Force and he will head to basic training. But his father is jealous of his success, a man with a short temper and a long reach who takes out his anger issues with the back of his hand.
His mother leaves him with a parting gift. Well, two gifts, actually. One is a book signed by a strange man, the other is an off-hand remark that the man he grew up with, the violent man he later admits inspired terror, is not his biological father. His real father is the strange man who signed the first gift.
Kahlil spends the rest of the show slightly off-kilter, knowing his father is out there somewhere all while trying to live his own life, to blaze his own path in life.
The most amusing part of the show is Kahlil's time in basic training. He catches the ire of his overbearing drill instructor, a man who spits invectives and is intent on breaking the recruits both physically and mentally.
The string of invectives and curse words spewing from the drill instructor character are both unspeakable in polite society and roll-on-the-floor hilarious.
Kahlil breezes through training at the top of his class and even gets chosen to tour with Tops in Blue, the Air Force's travelling entertainment show. But all along, the news about his real father nags at him, getting him to reach out to family members who may have information about this mystery man.
Watching Ashanti jump back and forth between the young and fresh-faced Kahlil and the over-the-top instructor is worth the price of admission, surely the first time in theatre history where an actor has been forced to haze himself for audience enjoyment.
While it's a great show, Basic Training does suffer from the same thing all one-man shows suffer from: too many characters and not enough time.
Ashanti jumps between the fellow recruit struggling to control his Tourette Syndrome, the kindly mother who just wants to see her baby boy succeed, the drill instructor with the potty mouth who probably just needs a hug, and the list goes on.
But Ashanti does wonders with each of his characters, every one of them infused with just enough personality to make them distinct, to stand out in their few seconds on stage.
But none are given enough stage time to breathe, to contribute to Kahlil's main story.
It's a good problem to have, to be too good at your craft, to provide too many interesting entry points into the action on stage and leaving audiences wanting more.
With more than 20 voices and personalities to juggle, it would be easy for one to bleed into the next, for the entire production to collapse under the rapid-fire delivery and quick changes between characters. But Ashanti brings a human touch to each, whether it's the well-meaning uncle trying to protect his nephew or the smart-mouthed bus driver who almost gets their entire group killed.
This is the first time Ashanti has been able to bring the show to the city, performing multiple sold-out shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival but never making it to Edmonton. It's a joy to see him get the spotlight here, to jump between these characters that obviously mean so much to him, to be able to tell such a personal story with laughs and just a few tears.
Basic Training is fringe theatre at its best, a laugh-out-loud oneman show with heart, a chance to see some great fringe-level theatre outside of the festival season.