Kahlil Ashanti - Comedian - Basic Training
Kahlil Ashanti - On October 13, 2008, BASIC TRAINING opened Off-Broadway at the Barrow Street Theater to rave reviews. It is a NY Times Critics pick and is currently in development as a feature film and a book. BASIC TRAINING is produced by Erich Jungwirth, Richard Jordan and Barry Josephson. And this is just the beginning.
My name is Kahlil Ashanti and when I enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1992 I never imagined that I would have the opportunity to serve my country with humor instead of bullets. Twelve years after being honorably discharged, I am telling my story on an Off-Broadway stage in a one-man show called BASIC TRAINING. This is my journey.
In October of 2002, I found myself living in Los Angeles sharing a decrepit North Hollywood house with a few roommates. When I say decrepit I mean there were mouse droppings on the dining room table and the roaches had actually given up and moved out. One of the roommates was the landlord, who shall remain nameless, but trust me when I say he was a character - short Mexican dude with a Yosemite Sam mustache.
Being an actor in Los Angeles was never my cup of tea because I never wanted to talk about acting - I just wanted to do it.
I had moved to LA to pursue a career in acting, but now I was feeling stuck. Making friends was hard because I always liked talking about barbecues or who was going to win the World Cup, not which television show I read for or which part I 'almost got'. In an effort to learn the lay of the land, I took some acting classes and was pleased to find some like-minded people which proved to be my first step in a fantastic journey.
One of these people was a girl from Trinidad named Dalia who was not only a confidant, but a solid person with more talent and pizazz than I had seen in a long time. We were never anything more than friends and that is what helped our chemistry on stage. We did an actors showcase where agents show up and critique you and the whole time you're hoping they might like you enough to represent your talent. We rocked the house, but we never got any feedback from the agents.
After that showcase, we went our separate ways and I quickly grew tired of attending acting classes, sending out headshots, etc. I felt like I was becoming a professional audition artist. That's when it hit me...I wasn't risking anything. I have always been a big reader, mostly biographies, and the one thing my favorite businessmen/women had in common was their level of risk. Working a nine to five job and pretending to put it all on the line is not the same as putting it all on the line. What if I put as much attention into my career as I put into paying somebody else's mortgage? So I quit my nine to five gig and took four crappy part time jobs to make ends meet. I was scared to death and needless to say the ends weren't meeting, but I had never felt so free.
In December 2002, I joined an acting class and decided to take matters into my own hands. Most acting classes require you to find a partner, rehearse, and perform scenes every week. I didn't have great connections so I decided I would just get on stage and tell my own stories.
During my time in the Air Force, I was a part of a performing group called Tops In Blue and our job was to perform for the troops on the front lines. This acting class was stacked with talent from popular television shows so I felt slightly intimidated, but I had nothing to lose. I knew my stories from Tops In Blue were unique because they were too bizarre to be false. Every Monday night I would stage a different scene from my time with Tops In Blue and before I knew it my fellow actors were encouraging me to compile it into a one-man show. My background was stand-up comedy so selling a character on stage came naturally to me. The more my home life fell apart, the better the show became.
By October of 2003, I was couch surfing and living out of my truck, but the show had grown into something bigger than I ever imagined. It was no longer just a compilation of funny stories. It was the true story of why I joined the Air Force-to escape an abusive father who I later found out was my step dad and how I ended up meeting my real father through Tops In Blue. My faithful friend Dalia brought as many people as she could to see a workshop of my one-man show and one of these people was writer/director Doug Atchison. When he approached me about the idea of making the show into a movie, I was slightly skeptical because everybody in L.A. is a writer/director. He seemed sincere and I trusted Dalia so I decided to hang with him and see what happened.
I spent the next year working on my show and trying to enter it into theater Fringe Festivals in Canada. At this point, things were getting worse and I was contemplating just packing it in and going back in the military. I mean, how much bad luck can one person take? I was in serious debt, too broke to date anybody and my health was in shambles. I was working the graveyard shift stacking shelves at Albertsons, doing birthday parties for rich people's kids, break dancing at weddings and bar mitzvahs and doing odd jobs for a tree stumping company.
In April 2004, I got an email from Doug. He told a film producer at 20th Century Fox about me and this producer wanted to meet. His name was Barry Josephson. There I stood at the 20th Century Fox movie lot in Barry Josephson's office as Doug pitched the movie - but instead of handing Barry a script I performed the scenes. In his words, Barry was 'blown away'. Nobody had ever pitched anything to him in that manner.
A month later Barry had me perform the show at a small gathering of industry people at his home (this place was HOOKED) and I did my one-man show in his living room. This was after doing two birthday parties and a bar mitzvah, but being tired was no excuse for me. Nothing to lose. When you have nothing, you can't get less of nothing. I got a standing ovation and Barry showed me to one of the hallways in his home and pointed to a poster of Whoopi Goldberg on Broadway. He put his arm around me and said, “I'm going to get your show to Broadway. “
On October 13, 2008, BASIC TRAINING opened Off-Broadway at the Barrow Street Theater to rave reviews. It is a NY Times Critics pick and is currently in development as a feature film and a book. BASIC TRAINING is produced by Erich Jungwirth, Richard Jordan and Barry Josephson. And this is just the beginning.
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