Maddox K. Pennington

I’ve always wanted to write for TV; aside from one pop culture trivia show I contributed some scripts to in 2010, it has always been miles away. I still wrote scripts, though. Especially once I built up my stand-up chops. But when quiet and chaos descended around the world, TV writing was like staring into a void of gatekeepers. It didn’t feel great. It felt…deluded. 

But you know what doesn’t have a huge barrier to entry? Plays. Put some words on a page and some kids in a barn and you’ve got yourself a show. Nobody can stop you. Flashbacks to first grade community theater and elementary school class plays and high school backstage bacchanalia and the crushing disappointment of every single college theater program saying “thanks but no thanks…” 

What I’m trying to tell you is, I signed up for a playwriting class online. DC’s Shakespeare Theatre, where I was raised on a steady diet of classics and corsets, offered an adaptation workshop and I took it. Instead of writing a multi-million dollar BBC fantasy piece, I summoned Charlotte Brontë and her underappreciated Shirley to the stage, a la The Princess Bride. A group of high school students would read the book, and it would come to life, and we’d all have a good time. We did have a good time. I learned a lot about stage directions. I met some other writers. 

I took a couple more playwriting workshops but just like doctors make terrible patients, I think teachers make the worst students and I wanted more structure. So I switched to acting classes and poached some writers to start a group that survived for about two years, until the world started reopening and grad school acceptances and relationships and day jobs interceded. We met once a week to set a timer and write for 45 minutes, then share pages. A few times a year we swapped full drafts and gave one another feedback. It was a lovely oasis of creativity and community when that was all any of us were craving. 

I wrote a four person play, a producible antidote to the 20 person epic I cut my teeth on. I registered it for the Virtual Pittsburgh Fringe, found a cast, rehearsed a few times and did a reading. It was surprisingly emotional. Not only for me, but for the cast, and the few folks who tuned in to watch them perform. 

I wrote another play. Attempted another one. Hated it. Wrote another pilot. A spec script. And by the time I put the finishing touches on it, I had another play idea. A beauty. An idea that couldn’t take any shape other than on a stage.  

This was my way forward, my next big thing. Not just the solitary discipline of setting timers and churning out word counts and finding friends to meet and read with. But the Hey Kids, Who’s Got a Barn of it all. 

When I was in college, studying music, I hated the solitude of practice. It’s what drove me to writing. But I had always, always loved the camaraderie of rehearsal. The grace of mistakes and improvement and being present. The moments we experienced as an ensemble that an audience might never know about, except as it infuses our chemistry. 

What brought me to California wasn’t the siren song of ambition, the lure of “the industry,” but the romance of commitment, trust, partnership. All the things I am….not great at in my personal life….I highly value, even consistently contribute, in my professional undertakings. 

When I moved from No.VA to New York, it was an inevitable migration. When I moved from New York to DC, it was an injured animal flight to lick wounds and regroup. 

But moving to California—bolstered by a teaching job that offered its own laurels and opportunities—was a grounded decision made by a capital R romantic. I would never have attempted the move without the job…but I wouldn’t have been so ready to go for the job without the Dream.

The temptation to jump for other people’s hoops is always there. Especially here. But the potential of shaping and leaping for my own is shiny and new. 

In May of 2021 I did that thing again—I flipped my whole life upside down and spun it into place somewhere else. But this time I did it with a little more warning. I got a new job (February), visited LA for the first time to confirm I wanted to live there (March), made a whole summer plan that got scrapped because a room in a friend’s apartment opened up, and I packed up my rainbow ombre DC life and put it in a truck for other people to worry about. Then I packed up myself and my dog and drove all the way across the country.