If you’re going to attend a trans theater festival called “The Joy Who Lived,” you know the organizers have a great sense for what our community needs right now. We could use some hope for our artistic futures and a dash of pettiness toward very public transphobes.
The festival, which will run in Los Angeles and on streaming starting today through April 27, was created and crowdfunded by comedian Laser Webber and producer Maddox Pennington. I’d seen Laser perform stand up at his trans comedy show Gentlemen’s Club, where his delivery is dry and his jokes hit with excellent timing.
I spoke to Laser and fellow festival producer and actor Petey Gibson on Zoom about the massive amounts of independent trans and gender non-conforming artists putting out their own work, how to create queer specific theater, and why it’s important to make the comedy scene welcoming and funny to marginalized groups.
Laser: What are you drinking, Pete? What is that?
Petey: Pure carrot juice. I want this on the record. I want it to reflect the values of the festival.
Gabe: In theory, I’m interested.
Petey: It’s really good. I have a very hard time eating vegetables.
Gabe: I say as I just had my thousandth coffee of the day. Okay! Do you want to explain, each of you, who you are and what you do?
Laser: Hi, I’m Laser Webber and I am one of the founders and producers of “Joy Who Lived” Festival.
Petey: I’m Petey Gibson. I’m a producer that came on later to support Laser and Maddox [Pennington]’s baby that is “The Joy Who Lived” Festival.
Gabe: I think I get it, but can you explain the title “The Joy Who Lived?”
Laser: So this festival came about because I knew the Harry Potter play [The Cursed Child] was coming to LA and I knew I was going to drive by a bunch of Harry Potter signs for like, nine months. And I know a lot of incredible trans performers in town, and I think people just talk about Harry Potter like it’s absolutely inevitable that you need to enjoy it and there’s no way in this world to stop giving her money – and her being J.K. Rowling, a person who expresses opinions about trans people I disagree with. So I thought maybe we should have a platform where we can say, “Wow, you had to go see that play? Well, we have our own alternatives by incredible trans people who are making cool art!” And that’s where the festival came about. The Joy Who Lived is a reference to the Boy Who Lived, which was a thing in a book called Harry Potter.
Gabe: How do you and Maddox know each other and how did you guys come up with this idea?
Laser: Maddox and I are boyfriends of each other. We met a few years ago actually both doing Hollywood Fringe [Festival].
Gabe: Oh, I know who that is then. I met them at the show you do with Charlie [James]. Cute!
Laser: Yeah! And then we’ve started dating and also have gotten engaged and recently started putting this festival together.
Gabe: Aw. You’re working with your partner. Do you recommend that to the general public?
Laser: Well, he’s a Pisces Moon and I’m a Virgo Moon and it’s a lot. But I think it’s really nice to have somebody I can trust that I work with and it’s really nice to know that it’s going to get done because when you have this many trans guys on something, the only risk is too much happening, I think.
Gabe: How did you come aboard, Petey?
Petey: As you know, we are so blessed in LA with this embarrassment of riches in the queer art and the trans art that’s being made. And somehow Laser and I didn’t know each other. We were doing really similar things around town. We know a lot of the same people. Laser came to see Tales of the Trancestors when I did that sold out run in December.
Gabe: I came to that show!
Petey: Yeah, you were there too. So [comedian] Griffin Kelly, who is just everyone’s favorite person in the world, finally put us on an email together and was like, “Hey, you two idiots. Laser’s doing a show and a festival and wants to talk to you.” And we were like, “Oh yeah, why haven’t we had coffee?” So we went to a coffee shop but had essentially milkshakes and just for three hours chatted about producing, about the festival – and kind of organically by the end of the meeting I was producing on the festival. It just kind of seemed like a natural fit. And something I really like about working with Laser and Maddox is we all have expertise in a lot of things, but not everything. And so we’re able to fill it in this way that feels very organic.
Gabe: How did you find the plays and performers for the festival?
Laser: Our initial reach outs went to a lot of folks that Maddox and I have worked with before. Maddox produced a show called The Trans Conversation Project last year, which had a bunch of people who were interviewed about their experiences and then other people performed a play that was basically verbatim from those interviews. So there was a bunch of a really lovely group of diverse trans folks that came out of that. So we basically reached out to people who we know do shows or who we thought maybe could use a push to do their show, as it is expensive to produce theater. And we knew we would have a little bit of resources to do this. And so that was the initial push. It was to folks that we knew that we could trust to make stuff happen. And then a little bit of a call on social media and then we had 20 shows and we said, “Let’s just go with this for the first one.”
Gabe: So for people who don’t know, let’s say they’re not in entertainment, and are like, what is a play festival? What happens if I go? Can you explain that?
Laser: So this festival is 20 plus different events. So if you go to the Joy Who Lived Festival, you might come to our opening night show, which is a comedy show called Gentlemen’s Club hosted by myself and Charlie James that’s going to have music by Rebecca Sugar, who created Steven Universe. It’s going to have comedy by River Butcher, one of my personal role models and heroes and a bunch of incredible stand up comedy and improv. Other nights you might go see a solo show. There’s a show called Spice Up Your Sex Life Until It Burns, which is a sex education presentation that turns into a meltdown because the person giving it has just been broken up with. So you might see that show, there’s an improv show at UCB [Upright Citizen’s Brigade]. There’s an all trans production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.
Gabe: What?
Laser: Yeah, it’s amazing.
Gabe: Oh my God.
Laser: And there’s a few brand new plays that are either getting productions or having readings. So you could be the first audience to see the reading of, there’s a show called There Is Evil in This House, which is kind of a religious trauma play written by Natalie Nicole Dressel that’s getting its first reading. There’s He/She which is JJ Maley, Tony Award-winning producer and writer, putting up a show that Petey is directing. So you’ll be able to see theater in all of its forms and comedy as well.
Petey: Can I add that something I really like about a festival setting and the fact that this is so long, it takes place over three weeks, is that it’s really a choose your own adventure. You could just go see really great comedy. You could go see these tiny independent solo shows. There’s a reading of A Streetcar Named Desire with Alexandra Billings and Brian Michael Smith and Rain Valdez.
Gabe: Oh, I just saw it. Jamie Clayton eats that up. She is like a once in a generation talent.
Petey: I’ve heard it’s incredible. And we did bring it on to the festival simply because none of us could make it that night.
Laser: The fact that Petey was like, well, maybe just Chaz Bono will be part of the festival now [in Streetcar]. I was like, oh, okay, cool. That’s the only trans person my parents had ever heard of before I came out, so that’s fantastic news.
Gabe: I didn’t even recognize him in the play. I was so immersed. And then afterwards I was like, wait, what? That was Chaz Bono?
Petey: I just feel like to go back to your original question of what is a festival, I think what it is for us is everyone can kind of have a choose their own adventure, but they can trust us that it is going to be for trans people and allies by trans people and allies and that whatever they go see, they’ll feel safe. They’ll feel taken care of. And so these are all shows where we’re saying, yeah, you should support this. You should go see it. We want the audience to feel good and the performers to feel good, and there’s workshops and things like that. So that to me is what’s important about a festival is to say, go to everything. Go to one thing, stream something, but we’re letting you know that we love you and we want you to have a great fucking time and you can trust us that you will.
Gabe: Do you think that theater and plays are mediums that are on the rise for trans people, creating, attending and even streaming live theater if you can’t be in the same city? I’ve seen such an uptick in trans theater in general.
Laser: Yeah, I was an independent musician and independent web creator, and as I get deeper into this industry, all I find is people who wish that they could do that, who wish they could just make the stuff they want to make. And I think that we can watch our trans siblings fight the system and get rejected so that a cis person can write a trans show or something. And it is really frustrating. So for me, theater is a way to tell stories and the acting and the writing is all you need to tell a story. You don’t need $14 million to tell it. So that’s where I’m coming from with it.
Petey: Well, I think on every possible level the conversation is swinging back towards community, community care, mutual aid. That’s something the queer community has always done really well. And I think America is doing in general right now, and theater is a perfect place for that to exist because it’s always existed. People have always done theater festivals, they’ve always done independent things because that’s something you can do for free. You can write a solo show, you can write a play and put it up with your friends. So we’re really glad to continue that theater legacy with the festival.
Gabe: You can even just do a reading and people love that.
Petey: Yeah, we have multiple readings in the show. The one that I’m directing is a new play reading from JJ. So yeah, we’ve got a real spectrum. Everything from readings to Charlie Brown.
Gabe: I’m probably going to cut this part, but Daniel: The He/They Play, that Tirosh Schneider wrote and is doing for your festival is loosely inspired by me. Or me and them. Sort of.
Laser: Oh no.
Gabe: No, no, it’s good. We’re friends. We’re buddies. I read it and I gave it my blessing.
Petey: The Gabe Dunn legacy of inspiring.
Laser: Only really bad art gets made about me, and I hate that.
Gabe: I really do love that play. Tirosh is a lovely, talented person. So anyway, yeah, I was thinking that as TV and movies become more bloated and more impossible to make on your own or get seen because it’s so inundated, it’s very interesting to have these plays for a group that historically does not have any money being able to sell out and being able to have people that want to come see them. I don’t know if you guys feel this way as well, but I live in kind of a dual reality where I’m being gaslit about there not being a trans audience, even though I am seeing it with my own eyeballs.
Laser: I used to be in a band and we would tour and the audience was so trans even before I came out. And it’s an incredible group of people in an incredible audience and it does exist. And I think we are trapped in this world of we want to see ourselves represented, but we also, most of when we’ve started hearing about trans folks all the time, it’s not us telling our own stories and it gets bloated to the point where we do have to go, by the way, we are not that many people. Please stop worrying about us. So I don’t know. That to me just goes back to kind of what Petey was saying about community at this point. If nobody could ever talk about us again on a national scale, but our communities could take care of us and we could get the healthcare that we needed and you could see folks enough in the community transitioning that folks could figure their shit out, that would be fantastic. We exist as an audience. I think it’s nice to have your local or your niche internet person that you can see — that visibility is so important, but it’s also, I don’t know, maybe everybody should just shut up and hang out in their towns.
Gabe: No, it’s the double-edged sword of visibility. This is such a hack joke, but I was like, to my friend Allison, at this point my pronouns are leave/me/alone.
Petey: I mean, I think we’re going to see a real artistic resurgence in this time as we always have. Because I think, I don’t know, maybe this is not for this conversation necessarily, but we’re in such a specific place that I feel like I’m starting to look back on the Act Up period of America. And that was very much like we take care of ourselves, because we as a community were abandoned by the government. We took care of ourselves and there were 10 different lanes in order to get rights and get care. And there was so much art that came out of it. And I think then the pendulum swung the other way and suddenly it was gay marriage and there was so much visibility and all of these things. And I think now we’re seeing mostly for the worse the pendulum is swinging back and it’s a waking nightmare. But also we are able to return to our roots, which is we take care of ourselves, we know how to make art, and there’s so many different people that are saying, “Hey, I know how to do social media.” “Hey, I can help with your accessibility.” “Hey, I can take tickets at the door.” “Do you need me to work security?” And I think the vision that Laser and Maddox sort of built has fallen so naturally into place because so many people are like, right, this is resonant for this moment. So I just think it’s nice that it exists.
Gabe: I think safety is also an issue. You touched on this a little bit about how you’re going to go to these shows and you’re going to feel held and you’re going to feel like nothing bad is going to happen. Years ago I was like, I don’t want to see standup comedy anymore. The reason I hated it was because there was no way to know if the person getting up next was going to say something horrible. And again, I am not being like, oh, I’m a snowflake. I can’t be here. But I was just like, this is boring. Everything is boring. You guys are boring. I found Emilia Pérez boring in the sense that it was only interesting to cis people.
Petey: Well, you can’t relax into entertainment if you’re constantly tense for catching strays. And it’s not that this festival is all about being very sweet. There’s a huge spectrum of emotion and content and themes that are happening. It is made by trans people so that we are able to tackle a lot of different themes within ourselves. I don’t go to stand up unless it’s like all women or all queer people. So opening at Dynasty Typewriter with Gentlemen’s Club is so hot and sexy to me. I’m so excited.
Gabe: Gentlemen’s Club is so funny.
Laser: I love it. I mean, it came from how I know so many trans femmes in my life who own 80 gowns and they have nowhere to wear them. And it’s just like, okay, so this is a formal trans space where we don’t have to listen to loud music. We can just hang out and be fashionable. I don’t want to go see standup either or even… God, I saw a solo show where a cis person was talking about their experience dating a trans person where they literally use the T slur. That’s not for you, just to be clear. So I’m so excited about this festival and most of the shows are sliding scale so people can see them for a dollar, people can watch them across the country. And I think to me, this is not the time for us to shut up. It is a little bit of the time for us to hide or just to be in our communities. But I think we still want to be able to talk to each other. And that’s why I’m excited about this festival because there is cool shit. There are cool conversations to have and I hope some of these plays are really dumb and they’re not about coming out, but I think that they will be fun for each other to watch. So that’s the goal.
Gabe: There’s so many specifics that I think just get tossed to the wayside. If I never see another movie where a trans woman goes home and confronts that she’s a woman now with her family, that will be great for me. And it’s not to say that the people that act in those don’t do a fantastic job, but it is just like, oh my God, write something else.
Laser: More jokes about having to wait for the stall in the men’s room. That’s what I want in this.
Gabe: The men’s room is disgusting.
Petey: The worst place in the world.
Gabe: I’m going to detransition because of the men’s room. Why are you peeing on the floor?
Petey: For me, I think the difference is cis men on the whole seem to not be invested in being in a society and cis women are. And so that’s the difference in the restrooms when you go into an all male space where there’s no women to clean up after men, it’s not going to get clean. They will walk through a pile of piss.
Gabe: They also don’t lock the door. Have you noticed that?
Petey: I can’t wait for your bathroom play at next year’s festival, Gabe.
Gabe: So in the beginning of the pandemic, I was doing these live reads where I was just taking random movies and then having only queer people in them. And for NewFest, we did all trans Brokeback Mountain, which was awesome. And then we did Ocean’s 11, we did The Social Network, we did all Black The Breakfast Club. And so they were so much fun and part of it was the subversion of stuff. And one that really eluded me is that I really wanted to do trans The Hangover. And [director] Carly Usdin and I would go through the scripts and try to make them not terrible and also make it usable. And we never did but I wanted to call it “The Trangover” so maybe I’ll bring that to your festival.
Petey: Fantastic. Let’s do it. Our hope is that this is the first festival of many.
Laser: That’s an energy Petey has brought and now is unavoidable, but there we go.
Gabe: I love the idea that this will keep on going and that you’re doing Gentlemen’s Club, but are you doing a play or anything Laser?
Laser: Yeah. My partner Maddox and I are doing a musical called Love Chicken, which is a non-binary love triangle at a cabin in the woods about a person who has transitioned and is still married to a cis straight guy. So we’re doing a reading of that with the incredible Jiavanni from Dropout. It’s a very beautiful cast and it’s very fun. So far, I’m so excited.
Gabe: I love Jiavanni.
Laser: Absolute star. He’s amazing,
Gabe: Well, is there anything else you would want people to specifically know or that you want to leave people with? Maybe trans people who feel bad right now?
Laser: I think art’s a great way to not feel alone, like making your own art or seeing other people’s art or just being a part of it. Whether you’re sitting in the room or watching at home. It doesn’t have to be on a huge billboard to matter to you. And I hope that you know that you matter to people out there.
Petey: I think the cure for almost everything is community and I think there is so much that can change your life just being in a room with other people, remembering that you’re not alone. Remembering that you have a show that you thought that you wanted to do and maybe now you can. If they can do it, I can do it. So just come be in community. We’re doing a lot of work around accessibility, so six of our shows have ASL interpretation and most of our shows are masked and so we’re trying to make it for the people.
Laser: I hope you are blessed to know enough trans people that some of them are annoying and you hate them.
Learn more about The Joy Who Lived Festival at their website.
This blog highlights the power of trans comedians and theater makers in challenging J.K. Rowling’s narrative, offering inclusive and diverse counter-programming. It’s inspiring to see how art amplifies marginalized voices.