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“I’m just trying to figure out what type of critter I am,” says Ash Allen, storyteller and comedian. “Because we’re all, like, just critters running around here.”
Allen’s charming folksiness isn’t an affectation. The Mississippi transplant credits her rural upbringing with the grounded gravitas she brings to stages today.
“I identified as being a critter before I identified as anything else.”
It’s an adorable aphorism, to compare oneself to the squirrels and possums and varied rodentia dominating the woods and yards of her childhood, but the statement hits differently uttered in Allen’s softly tempered twang. In a city of transplants, Allen stands out as someone so uniquely Portland-coded it’s almost uncanny. It’s as if a caricature of a Portland lesbian walked off a page and onto a stage. But that twang is authentic, as is Allen’s simple folding of story and comedy to produce sets that are at once moving, revelatory and pants-pissingly hilarious.
Allen has a universal appeal disarming enough to cradle audiences large and small across the gender spectrum. In fact, Allen has found Portland comedy far less compartmentalized than it may socially appear, and she feels as comfortable in cis spaces as she does in the queer spaces where she performs.
“I think the queer spaces are more for the audiences, to find safe space and build community,” Allen waxes. “I’m just privileged to be included.”
Gratitude plays heavily into Allen’s character, whether intentional or not. When she launched her comedy career four years ago, hitting up open mics and workshopping the voice she’s since refined, Allen reminisces about the ease with which she integrated into the scene. “I felt like I started late—I started at 37—and all of the people at the other mics were like 22…I feel like I’ve been catching up. I’m 40 and I’ve been really trying to do double time because I’ve always wanted to do this, but I waited.” Allen laughs. “I was like that meme, ‘Hello, fellow kids.’”
We laugh, but Allen has unintentionally pointed out another of her distinguishing marks: her age. That mature POV does something like level the playing field. Allen considers herself as much a storyteller as a comedian, occupying both spaces in a way few other performers in town can. She utterly lacks pretense, possessing a dearth of posturing and an absence of onstage artifice. Behind a mic or beside the bonfire, her authenticity comes through first and foremost. Allen says she wants to be “as free as I possibly can be onstage.”
“I think to be a really good storyteller, you don’t have to make yourself look good in the story. It’s not about how you appear in the story or the joke,” she says. “So for me to be as comfortable, as free as I can, telling the truth—identifying the truth in absurdity—is important.”
She adds: “I have a long way to go, but that’s the art of being comfortable being uncomfortable. Its pursuit.”
Allen cites her grandmother as a huge figure in her comedy and story careers, and is producing an hourlong show this year, Big Feelings Baby, that pays gentle homage to their relationship. Allen’s grandmother was a tremendous influence—and also, incidentally, gay.
“I talk about my dead grandma a lot,” says Allen of her upcoming solo show, “and it does feel like resurrection. Writing is resurrection and storytelling is conjuring. My grandma, she saw the true critter in me.
“Besides, I can’t go wrong when I’m talking about my gay grandma.”
What’s the funniest thing Ash Allen has seen in Portland?
“There’s a billboard on MLK with, like, a man with his head in his hands, and it just says, ‘Anxious? Jesus.’ That’s it. What does it mean? I don’t know, I might never know, but like, somehow it also makes total sense.”
