Feature: The Infernal Partnership of Peter Fenton and Avery Kellington

Lead photo: Avery Kellington as Teresa plays a mind game on Yuliana Sleme as one of her freshly departed playthings. (Photo by Brendan John Jones)

Update: Abandon All Hope will run at WestArt Lancaster (800 Buchanan Ave, Lancaster PA 17603) on Thursday, May 9 and Friday, May 10, at 7:00pm.

It’s the summer of 2019, and Avery Kellington is pretending to be asleep in a movie theater. She is also, as it happens, pretending to be the sexagenarian Oklahoma wife of a retired rodeoman-slash-cattle auctioneer. It is her first time pretending to be this, and according to the director, it is going rather well. Behind her, a young man named Peter Fenton pretends to eat popcorn. Probably he eats a little, from curiosity, hunger, or simply the sense of freedom one has being an extra rather than a lead. In a few years, long after the movie is released, Kellington will be one of the few people who remember Fenton’s minor role in that scene. They’ll laugh as they tell the story of how their partnership started, improbably, back on the set of Calf Rope in rural central Pennsylvania, one plot of pastureland standing in for another a few thousand miles away. 

What comes next? As creative partners do, Fenton will create ex nihilo a special comic hell for which Kellington turns out to be the perfect resident demon. They’ll mount a one-night play Off-Broadway called Abandon All Hope and split the guts of a sold-out house, solidifying their sense that both the play and their partnership have exciting lives ahead. As for the ever after…well, that’s in the works, and signs point to plenty of work ahead of them. But let’s pause them and inquire about their present toil. As always, dear theater people, the good stuff is in the details.

Collaborating in a time of isolation

Salvation, love, and damnation are all species of fate, depending on whom you ask. Sometimes, though, providence is most active in life’s tiniest happenings, the things that might just as well not have been, if not for a memory recalled or an impulse pursued.

A few weeks into 2020’s pandemic lockdown (woof!), Fenton was working on a play about a fun-loving demon, three freshly deceased college freshmen, and a diabolical game. He was pondering whether to revise it or scrap it when a bit of bones-honest feedback from his father pointed him in the right direction: “It really needs work, but you might have something with this opening monologue.”

An imperceptible tingle in the electromagnetic spectrum carried a Facebook message from Fenton to Kellington suggesting he might have a part for her, i.e. a fun-loving demon with an outré opening monologue. A few binary bleep bloops later, Kellington fell in love with a character she calls “an absolute diamond” - in fact, she says,  “more rare than a diamond, I think, because Peter has written in the voice of an intriguing, complex, smart, little bit brash but ultimately vulnerable and wounded woman. And I recognized that in the early draft of the monologue.”

Unasked, Kellington recorded herself reading the monologue and sent it in reply. Bloopadoop. Buffering. A tremble of Fenton’s tympanic membrane, and the love is mutual. “A chill ran down my spine,” he says. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, I have something. This is a project worth sticking with, and the minute I want to move forward with this, she’s my girl.’”

The play follows three 19-year-olds who have died and arrived in hell, or more specifically, Brimstone Hall, which looks suspiciously like a college dormitory. There, they meet a mischievous wine mom of a demon who forces them to play a game in which (spoilers for bargains with demons) nobody really wins: the winner goes to heaven at the cost of psychologically tormenting the other two for eternity.

“All three of these 19-year-olds exist in such a way that they are the perfect people to torture each other. There’s no devices of torture, no blood and gore,” Fenton says. From a “militant feminist” sorority sister to a calculating, closeted Ivy-leaguer and an earnest conservative Evangelical, the three are set to spark and develop in meaningful ways, Fenton says. 

For Fenton and Kellington, the dream was a feature film that would do the script and its characters justice.

“We were pretty good to go. Pretty much the only thing we needed was the money for the feature film,” Fenton says. Unfortunately, “the money” was a quarter of a million dollars. “We’ve got a lot of spirit, a lot of heart, tons of talent between the two of us—”

“Great senses of humor,” Kellington adds, “and we’re nice people! But that does not necessarily equate to resources.”

Alas for the film. (Patrons and producers, you may take your cue.) 

As fortune would have it, though, Fenton came down with an extraordinary case of the flu.

“I hadn’t been sick like that in a really long time, and I started taking stock of, ‘What is my life amounting to?’ You know, as you do, when you have the flu and you haven’t been sick in at least three and a half years,” Fenton jokes. “And I realized that I needed to see Abandon All Hope happen. Like, really happen.”

Fenton called Kellington, and it was set. They had ten weeks to pull a show together in time for the Rogue Theater Festival in New York. Rehearsals had to unroll over Zoom, but with an “angel gift” from a supporter and a solid cast, the rhythm set in. The New York production would be directed by none other than Gorman Ruggiero, the aforementioned rodeoman-slash-cattle auctioneer who starred across Kellington in Calf Rope - and who does, in fact, own a ranch, where the cast rehearsed in person for the first time before the festival.

Pulling it off was all hands on deck, many of those hands doing triple duty. Fenton ran sound. Kellington built a door. But somehow, it worked. Feedback was positive. The two began looking for the next venue for their diabolical dark comedy. What they found, ironically, was Beacon Church in the River Wards area of Philadelphia. And, well, as the red letters said, “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”

Mice, men, and rain checks

The production is not, evidently, immune to acts of god. The two-night Philadelphia production of Abandon All Hope, originally slated for August, was postponed due to a cast emergency. As of the time of writing, we don’t have a new show date. But don’t give up hope just yet: when we have a new show date, I’ll put it here in big, bold letters.

A match made

Fenton and Kellington get a kick out of their ‘odd couple’ identity credentials: Fenton a gay man in his twenties, Kellington a timeless divorcée who re-imagined her career a decade ago. The truth is, though, they’re salt and chocolate, jam and brie, Tajin on the rim of your marg: an effortless pairing that wouldn’t throw off a girls’ night. Like a pair of thespian bridge trolls, Fenton and Kellington have three rules to work by:

1. Tell the truth.

2. Best idea wins.

3. No assholes allowed.

You can find them written on Fenton’s website, a page over from his debut middle-school play that, allegedly, still packs a laugh (being “A delightfully silly tale of impossible quests and misplaced chivalry in the wink-wink, nudge-nudge tradition of Spamalot,” writes Myrtle Beach-based playwright Donald E. Baker.) Juvenilia is not for nothing, Fenton holds. “You can trace the line of how the writer of Abandon All Hope wrote Good Knight and Goodbye. I still write from a similar place. It’s very fun, and I have found a way to turn that fun into what drives me in life.”

Jokes aside, Kellington says, “The partnership has worked beautifully.” And the work that’s coming out is something I intend to keep an eye on. Future projects in the pipe include a collegiate Peter Pan retelling called I Think We’re Lost (with Kellington slated for Wendy) and a potential solo show for our dear demon Teresa, last seen polishing off a bottle of white that had surely not been chilled properly. 

A full audio version of the interview with Fenton and Kellington, including a special segment on the questions they wish critics would ask, is in production. I’ll link it below when it’s ready.

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