Maddox K. Pennington

On my favorite TV shows they sometimes leap forward weeks or months. Or even a year. 

In that time perhaps the main character has changed their hair or fallen out of touch with an ex or left town or returned to town. 

In this leap I just made, I produced and directed my own play—Love Chicken, a nonbinary rom-com about best friends who absolutely need to figure their shit out or they are going to keep blowing through relationships without ever getting what they need.  

Knowing how it all turned out, I write this looking back and wanting to capture that absolute terror of overwhelmed whimpering and thrashing.

Soon after arriving in LA I realized, irritatingly, that “things always work out.” Not on the timeline you want, not always, but at some point! If you stay anchored in what you can produce and achieve, where no gatekeeper can get in your way, things just “turn out.” With irritating consistency! Sometimes you’re on the verge of giving up and storming back to the East Coast when things just fall into place with an ease you could not have manufactured (which you know for sure, because you tried). 

And sure, lots of dreams come here to die, effort goes to waste, potential evaporates like the mist this city thinks is rain. And yes, you can plan everything perfectly and every single piece goes wrong except the last one which still feels like a rebuke to you, personally, for lacking faith in the whole west coast ethos of “like chill, brah.” 

NB: I CANNOT. MY SPIRIT WAS FORGED IN THE DARKNESS OF SEASONAL AFFECTIVE DISORDERS WHEN WE COULD NOT CHILL FOR FEAR WE WOULD NEVER WAKEN. 

Anyway, on the last day of registration for the Hollywood Fringe Festival I found out I’d won a small scholarship that came with the support of a producing collective that prioritized first timers.

Fine, I sighed gustily, I guess that’s gonna work out. I registered my show. I put out a casting call on Backstage (which is different from Backpage). Actors actually signed up to audition. My friends and I looked at photos of a lot of very attractive people, many of whom are talented. I cast some of them. We rehearsed. I booked a venue. I found props. An intimacy coordinator acquaintance did us a solid and worked with the cast. I made flyers. Friends and family and long lost exes donated money to the project. I learned about QLab and while stress-crying, created a sound design. We tweaked blocking. We had a tech rehearsal. I gave instructions about brightness and color. I introduced myself as a director, a producer, a playwright. 

A perennial concern to me is whether milestone achievements actually feel like anything. In my experience, they often don’t. 

As always this has more to do with my expectations than plebeian reality. Am I actually feeling what’s in the moment, or am I comparing the present to my expectation? Or am I immediately watering down the achievement to avoid being disappointed? 

When I sold my book, I felt very little. I had first assumed it would sell, then assumed it would never sell, due to being garbage, so I simply reverted back to my “oh yes, I thought that would happen” stance. When the book came out, I felt a rush of…something…from holding it in my hands for the first time. But then I opened it and found two typos. So that feeling of loftiness was quickly diluted by the search for outside validation. I had to learn slowwwwly that (almost) nobody was going to put the same time, energy, attention into reading the book as I had put into writing it, and being a perfectionist pragmatist killjoy, that made me relegate all feedback to the giant tank of “Emotional Impact” that is perpetually at “insufficient” levels. Unless you could demonstrate particular enjoyment that was also discerning and insightful, you were basically telling me what I already knew, my book “meets expectations”, thank you for your time. (I’m a pill sometimes). It puts me in mind of the slaughterhouse pathways that Temple Grandin consulted on; I’m protecting myself from overwhelming feelings by channeling any excesses smoothly away. 

But producing Love Chicken kicked aside all my carefully curated emotional impact pathways.  The herd of feelings pushed down every fence and railing. After every rehearsal I was exhausted and needed to sleep for an hour or two. This is a side effect of repeated exposure to acting, I have learned—and not just the practice of emoting, but people reading—really reading —your work and finding things in it that you didn’t know were there. The exchange of direction is similarly exulting and draining. I want it to feel like X, so I suggest something to consider or try, and the actors produce it, and suddenly I am not only feeling X, I’m buoyed up by this feedback loop of implicit communication. I sometimes have to remind myself to give validating, appreciative feedback to my students, fighting the temptation to focus on revision or correction, but watching and directing these actors, appreciation streamed from my pores. Accompanied by, or translated into, words, of course.

So after too-short weeks of rehearsal, we put on a show. I was incredibly touched by the friends and family and acquaintances who came out to see it. They seemed to like it. I put us up for some awards, and we won some.  By then I was thousands of miles away watching my little show win things through the cast’s livestreams and instastories, but it felt like something. 

Even so I attempted to find clever ways to discount the accomplishment. There weren’t that many plays (…there were 200+), the awards team didn’t see all of them (they saw 40+), I have an MFA so it’s cheating (….. that’s nothing.) 

Fortunately my friends didn’t let me. 

This year, we’re doing it again but bigger and more. It’s so much scarier when you let a project get bigger than the scope of your grasp. What’s that saying that nobody understands about a reach and a grasp and shooting for the moon and drifting away in the stars like George Clooney in Gravity? 

It’s like that.

If you’d like to support us, and help bring ANNEX: a dark comedy about mental illness, queer family, and magical realism to the Zephyr Theatre for the 2023 Hollywood Fringe Festival, you can donate or share our campaign and keep an eye out for goodies like pins and t-shirts. Tickets will go on sale May 1st!