Playwright Preston Max Allen, whose recent work, the folk-punk musical Never Better, is currently being staged at Theo Ubique Cabaret Theater, said that he has “always been writing, and I’ve always been very dramatic.”
He realized that he was transgender at age 24. As Allen grappled with issues surrounding his identity, writing became a refuge of sorts. He recalled that it “was a great way to kind of disappear, and to create characters who were better at womanhood than I was. … So I could really kind of disappear into those [characters]. It sounds pretty lame, but it’s very true—it was a great way to kind of dissociate, for better and worse.”
Never Better, which runs through Oct. 13, is a musical depicting a young woman facing a chronic illness that she has written off as a cold. When her doctor recommends follow-up testing, she faces an existential crisis positing “the value of survival in a world weighed down by grief, loneliness and fears of an uncertain future,” according to press materials.
Allen has “long been devoted” to writing Never Better. Though its themes tie strongly into problems and questions the world faced during the COVID crisis, he said that he began working on the musical years before the pandemic began.
He wrote the play on-and-off from 2014 through 2017, then revisited it again in 2019. But Allen was in the midst of transitioning and did not feel emotionally prepared to respond to the critiques he got from friends and colleagues. By this year, however, he was ready to tackle Never Better once more, spending about six months revising the play.
After all those years of work, Allen recalled, “I had already sort of cleared my head on how to respond to so many of those notes I’d gotten previously, and adjust so many things.”
He expressed admiration for Never Better’s cast and crew’s courage and sensitivity in mounting a production that touches on numerous delicate themes.
“We wanted everyone to feel really safe, and really taken care of, and have access to help if they needed it,” Allen said, adding that the Never Better team is “ a really connected group of people. I’ve had a really wonderful time with this production. It’s been really special.”
He said Never Better, with its themes of “isolation, capitalistic collapse and illness,” is now more relevant than ever. The central character, Davy, struggles to wrap her mind around both the possibility of a chronic illness and the barrage of information that now comes with that possibility.
Davy initially resists further testing “due to quite a few circumstances in her life and with her mental health. Some experiences she’s had over the last few years are really challenging her when she looks at trying to plan for the future and and get treatment. … I always think of [Never Better] as much more of a character study than something with a containable plot. I guess it is very intimate.”
Allen is a Texas native, but his family has deep ties to the Chicago area. “My mom is from from Highland Park,” he explained. “So growing up, we were just constantly here. My dad’s from New York, which is where all theater comes from, but my mom was an actress when she was younger as well. So we got the New York side of it, and the Chicago side of it.”
He began writing when he was eight or nine, he said, serving up various scripts that were often inspired by the movies and TV his family watched. At one point he wrote a one-act parody of the Disney Channel that his high school produced.
Allen wanted to go to school close to family members, so he went to college in Chicago. He then headed for New York City. But after seven years there, he returned to the Windy City.
Allen enjoys the Chicago theater community’s collaborative nature, and appreciates that Never Better’s production was led with “heart,” which is ultimately “a testament to [how] in Chicago so many productions are just fueled by, ‘We are doing this because we love doing this’ … Here everyone showed up and [was] so dedicated to what we were doing in that moment.”
Now that Never Better is close to wrapping its run, Allen plans for some time to recharge his batteries.
“I’m taking a little bit of a break,” he said. “I’m a little bit burned out. I had another deadline with a project that overlapped pretty heavily with this one, and just a lot of really difficult work. I want to watch Netflix and play Mario.”
Never Better runs through Oct. 13 at Theo Ubique Cabaret Theater, 721 Howard St., Evanston. For more information, see theo-u.com.