In “Abandon All Hope”, Peter Fenton Invites Us Into a New Kind of Grace; A Review.
Peter Fenton is not your usual playwright, and “Abandon All Hope” is not your usual dark comedy. Fenton’s prose is not intended solely for the purposes of entertaining the lucky readers and viewers of “Abandon All Hope” , but also for the reader to begin the process of asking difficult questions as to what exactly makes us all human, and how do we make meaning of our humanity in a world where we are confronting with so many different cultural, religious, and political suppositions?
The questions posed by Fenton’s play, unlike an exam, are not intended to be answered, but deeply pondered, and it puts the reader in the position of constantly having to question their belief system, no matter how convicted they may be that it is right.
From page one onward, the reader is taken on a journey, and is forced to see themselves embodied in three characters, the dogmatic (Evan), the self-righteous (Melissa), and the apathetic (Sean). Each of the three characters, who are college students, are sent to hell after dying abrupt deaths, through some action of their own faulty making. They are placed in a dorm room, with each having their picture put up on a wall, a reminder of their differences and yet their startling similarities. Guided in an unscrupulous game, where they are forced to look for a necklace in order to get out of hell (thus keeping their two roommates in hell) by their charismatic demon/guardian Teresa, our characters will explore parts of themselves, the good and bad, in community, a community with people who they have been trained to either dislike or dismiss.
Our three characters are forced into a kind of grace that’s atypical of many characters the reader may stumble upon in their book or play experiences. They are forced to confront each other’s weaknesses and strengths, and make room for both, all the while navigating the tricky questions surrounding what exactly each of them did to “deserve” hell, if they believe in hell at all, whether or not their lives were meaningful and authentic to the people they present themselves as, and just how much confidence they should or should not have in their assumptions about God, people, and the world.
Any group of young people would have trouble answering those questions. Any people at all, really. The difficult experiences of life are often the ones where we discover how quick our confidence in things we once took for granted as truth is subjective and mailable, and that is certainty true for our characters. They are confronted with their own insecurities and faults, to the point that they cannot help but have grace for their equally faulty roommates.
In the characters of each one of these young people lies characteristics so common in each of us. Like Evan, we are utterly convinced of ourselves, and sometimes it’s hard for us to let go of belief systems that were ingrained in us as children, even if they hurt other people. Like Melissa, we all want justice, at least in part, and we struggle with matching our righteous indignation and presentations of empathy with our actual everyday lives. Like Sean, we let our intellect get the best of us, and we hide those parts of ourselves that we think could make us susceptible to getting hurt or ridiculed. And like Teresa, part of us just wants to have a laugh at it all, to sit as life’s observer and take it all in, without fully participating in the whole messy ordeal.
Behind the dark comedy of this play, and indeed Fenton has quite the sense of humor and I found myself laughing out loud multiple times, lies an enduring message. It doesn’t really matter if we’re religious or not, convicted or not, bound to one view of the world or another. What matters is our grit in having grace and holding enough space for those who don’t see the world quite like we do. The need for this new kind of grace is what Peter Fenton wants us to have, as the risk of not having it means we do indeed, abandon all hope.
