Theatre / Abandon All Hope

If Jean-Paul Sartre was right when he said Hell is other people — then a freshman dorm room might be your perfect picture of Hell on earth.

"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here"
It’s a little bit on the nose, wouldn’t you say? When they hang this big old sign above the entrance to Hell, the land of eternal damnation, telling you, "Give up, it doesn’t get better"? I’d imagine a human soul with an eternity of torture in front of them every moment of every day for the remainder of their existence would see this sign and think — yeah. No shit, Sherlock.

—Teresa, Chapter One: Red Wine

Abandon All Hope is a dark existential comedy play by Peter Fenton, which is set to premiere Off-Broadway as part of the Rogue Theater Festival in June 2023 starring Avery Kellington as Teresa.

When three college freshmen (a scrappy feminist, a naïve evangelical, and a cocky logistician) meet in Hell—which appears as a dorm room—they are forced to play a game with eternal stakes, which draws out each one's fatal flaws in their interactions with each other and a fun-loving demon. The winner will go to Heaven at the cost of the other two’s eternal torture.

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Abandon All Hope contains examples of:

• Abhorrent Admirer: Sean openly laughs Melissa off when she suggests hooking up with him.
• All Love Is Unrequited: Invoked and enforced. Evan likes Melissa, Melissa likes Sean, Sean likes Evan.
• Ambiguous Ending: Present in the text and lampshaded by Teresa – she genuinely has no idea what will happen.

• Asian and Nerdy: Sean initially is presented as a straight example, but this image is deconstructed in Part 2. The reason he has pushed himself as hard as he does studying engineering and game theory is to differentiate himself from his Hollywood royalty parents.
• Badass Normal: Melissa is willing to go toe-to-toe with a demon. 'Nuff said.
• Big Good: Teresa isn’t actually a demon at all. She’s a guardian angel thinking way, way outside the box to get Evan, Melissa, and Sean to turn their lives around and be better people.
• Bigot with a Crush: Southern Baptist fundamentalist Evan has an unrequited crush on the feminist atheist Melissa. Inverted with Sean's unrequited crush on Evan.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Melissa and Evan both and neither of them are aware.
• A Birthday, Not a Break: Melissa's death flashback takes place at her 20th birthday party.
• Black Comedy: The play is littered with dark comedy. Teresa speaks very matter-of-factly about the deaths of Sean, Evan, and Melissa:
  TERESA: ...if I stepped one toe out of line, I’d take a two-scream fall. You don’t know what a two-screamer is? When you’re falling, screaming long enough that you have to take a breath and start a new scream? A two-screamer!
• Book Ends: The play begins and ends with Teresa drinking wine alone in Brimstone Hall Room 664. Additionally, we hear how each of Evan, Sean, and Melissa’s death scenarios play out at the beginning and see how they are avoided when given a second chance in the end.
• Butt-Monkey: Evan makes himself a very easy target for Melissa and Sean's ridicule.
  EVAN: I wouldn't say that I'm a religious person, but I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
  MELISSA: Soooo......... super religious.
• But You Were There, and You, and You: In each character's flashbacks to their death day, the other actors in the play portray characters corresponding to how that character is viewed by the one having the flashback – most notably casting Melissa as Evan's love interest, Rachel, Sean as Melissa's love interest, Justin, and Evan as Sean's love interest, Adam.
• Celestial Bureaucracy: Implied when Teresa talks about taking orders from God and Jesus up in corporate or how she's been promoted from "shoulder duty".
• Chekhov's Gag: Melissa repeatedly thinks she’s seen Sean before. Turns out she’s right, Sean has a famous mother.
• The Chessmaster: Teresa, in her manipulation of the three humans and creating the environment that leads them directly into the situation that will torture them the most.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Evan comes across as one, especially his reaction to watching his own death.
  EVAN: Whoa. That's embarrassing... I should've known Romans One.
  TERESA: Is that really what you should take away from... any of that?
• Complete-the-Quote Title: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” from The Divine Comedy.
• Conspicuous Consumption: Teresa comments on Sean's underwear being Armani.
• Dead to Begin With: Played straight at first, as the first time we see Melissa, Sean, and Evan is after their deaths take place, but this trope is ultimately subverted when Teresa reveals Brimstone Hall Room 664 is an elaborate ploy, that she has brought them there to teach them a lesson.
• Deadpan Snarker: Sean and Melissa spend most of their interactions snarking at each other.
  MELISSA: How could you live with that?
  SEAN: Technically, we’re all dead-
• Debut Queue: The main cast is introduced one-by-one-by-one over the first two scenes. First, Teresa, then she wakes Melissa, Sean, and Evan in order.
• The Ditz: Happy-go-lucky sweet summer child Evan Daigle.
  SEAN: [My photo is] my headshot.
  EVAN: You were arrested??
  SEAN: (laughs) No, headshot. Like, actors.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Played for Laughs Teresa vehemently rebukes Evan when he suggests using his time in Hell to help cure Sean's homosexuality. Subverted when we find out Teresa is Good All Along.
• Fair-Weather Friend: Melissa likes to think she’s a friend to all living creatures, but the moment she has a chance to prove herself, she bails. This quality leads to her death.
• Femme Fatale: Melissa is described in the stage directions as a "scrappy femme fatale type". Teresa being a former Golden Age Hollywood actress also qualifies.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: Notably averted, but referenced in the name of the torture chamber - Brimstone Hall, Room 664.
• Freudian Trio: Melissa is the Id, Sean is the Ego, Evan is the Superego.

• Gay Aesop: Evan's character arc is all about learning to listen to the gay people in his life and take their experiences at face value.
• Genki Girl: Teresa qualifies as a middle-aged example.
• Good Counterpart: In Melissa’s flashback, Krista seems to believe in everything Melissa does but she follows through on caring about other people.
• Gone Horribly Right: Teresa's torture chamber actually leads Melissa, Evan, and Sean to become better people, which we learn was her plan all along.
• Guardian Angel: Teresa is ultimately one for Evan, Sean, and Melissa.
• Heel Realization: Melissa gets one when she quietly realizes she’s extremely selfish in her conversation with Teresa surrounding her death flashback. She becomes The Atoner in Act Two.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: All three of Evan, Melissa, and Sean die self-afflicted deaths brought on by their own character flaws. Evan is struck and killed by a bus while blindly proselytizing to a lesbian, Melissa falls off a roof while taking a selfie, and the lovestruck Sean goes into a pie-eating contest to impress his crush without checking to see what allergens were in the pie. Doubles with Ironic Death.
• Imagine Spot: Some read the final scene as one for Teresa.
• Inelegant Blubbering: Of all people, Sean, when he finds out Evan is willing to sacrifice his spot in Heaven for him – which is what causes him to unintentionally reveal he has feelings for Evan.
• Inscrutable Oriental: Sean fits this trope, at first.
• Ironic Hell: Each of Evan, Sean, and Melissa were people who pushed others away in life. What's their punishment in Hell? Being stuck with each other in a tiny room forever.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Melissa starts off this way – her brash demeanor seems to stand in contrast with her social advocacy and humanitarian ideals, but when push comes to shove, she's ultimately just looking out for herself. She gets better.
• Knight Templar: Evan is a downplayed example of one in his life, overly committed to righting what he interprets as wrong in the name of Evangelical Christianity. This is essentially the reason he is in Hell, which he realizes in his brief My God, What Have I Done? realization in the second act.
• Lemony Narrator: Teresa is a variant, given she only narrates the opening and closing. In the staged readings, however, Producer Tony Gapastione hams it up reading the stage directions aloud. Jim Fenton delivers an equally hammy performance in reading the stage directions in the 2021 Nashville reading.
• MacGuffin: Teresa's talisman is the driving force of the search plot.
• Maybe Ever After: When Sean returns to earth in the moment of his would-be death, he and Adam’s future is left ambiguous.. Additionally, Melissa and Justin’s future is left ambiguous given the ending.
• Meaningful Name: The principal character names reflect each of their principal struggles. ‘Evan’ is the first four letters of the word Evangelical. ‘Me’ is the first two letters of Melissa. The name ‘Sean’ resembles the word ‘seen’.
• Motor Mouth: Get any of Evan, Melissa, and Sean talking about their "thing" (respectively: religion, social justice, or game theory) and it's hard to stop.
• Mundane Afterlife: Evan, Sean, and Melissa are sentenced to spend eternity in a college dorm room.
• Nice Girl: Rachel, Evan's girlfriend, who is really trying as politely as she can to break things off with him.
• No Antagonist: Depending on how you read it. Being a character-driven piece, there is no Big Bad in this story, but Sean, Melissa, and Evan respectively serve as each other’s antagonists.
• No-Sell: Melissa attempts to harness the power of Teresa’s talisman against her in the climax, which proves to be completely ineffective.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Sean demonstrates right off the bat that Melissa and Evan really aren't that different from each other as he tears both of their patterns of logic apart.
• Once More, with Clarity: We hear scattered lines out of context from each of Sean, Evan, and Melissa's death sequences before we get to see each flashback sequence in-context.
• Our Demons Are Different: Teresa appears no different from a normal, human woman other than her Badass Fingersnap magic and what she shares about a talisman giving her power to do some of the more "spectacular torture".
• Overly Narrow Superlative: Melissa describes in-universe Hollywood actress Elsa Liu as “the Asian ‘it girl’ of the late 90s”.
• Plot Twist: Teresa doesn’t get her power from a talisman. And she’s not a demon. She’s actually a guardian angel and the torture chamber was set up for each of the humans to confront their fatal flaws in the moments before they make the decision that will kill them.
• Proud Beauty: Melissa Jones.
  MELISSA: There's a key difference between my worst picture and the worst picture.
• Scare 'Em Straight: Given the ending, to an extent, Teresa's gambit is a pretty straight example.
• Spicy Latina: Present, but downplayed with Natalia Dominguez’s portrayal of Melissa in the 2020 staged reading and Yuliana Sleme's portrayal of Melissa in the Off-Broadway World Premiere.
• Straight Gay: Sean, to the point where homophobic Evan is jealous of his masculinity.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Melissa lays one hard into Evan after he turns against Sean when Sean is revealed to be gay.
  MELISSA: I could name twenty reasons Sean belongs in Hell and not a single one has a thing to do with [Sean being gay]—might I add... I don’t think your Gospel saved you. So maybe step all the way back? He cares about you. Y-you’re already in Hell with him. Why would you push anyone away? He cares about you.
• Trickster Mentor: Teresa, even before the reveal that she is Evan, Sean, and Melissa's guardian angel.
• Undignified Death: Really all three of the death sequences, but Sean gets it the worst – dying in the most embarrassing way in public on a stage in front of a crowd when he's so clearly doing what he did for the man he loves.
• Unwitting Instigatorof Doom: Adam for Sean, goading him into taking the challenge to eat the Black-Bottom Hazelnut Pie.
• Victoria's Secret Compartment: When Melissa finds the talisman, she hides it in her bra.
• Wham Line: After revealing the necklace wasn’t the source of her power, Teresa delivers the following line—
  TERESA: The good news is I lied about something else. This isn’t Hell.
• Worthy Opponent: Teresa grows to see Melissa as one, especially once Melissa genuinely surprises her by destroying the talisman.

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