She Kills Monsters by Qui Nguyen (2011)

She Kills Monsters by Qui Nguyen (2011)

TW: Homophobia, Molestation Mention

 

SYNOPSIS

            On the night of Agnes’s college graduation she wishes to no longer be mundane and her wish is answered by her whole family dying in a car accident. While packing stuff up to move in with her boyfriend of three years she finds her younger sister Tilly’s Dungeon Master’s journal for a homebrew Dungeons & Dragons campaign and Agnes figures it’s the best chance she has to learn more about her late sister. She meets a friend of Tilly’s at a D&D shop that agrees to DM the campaign for her that thankfully includes Tilly’s paladin along with two other characters in her party, Lillith and Kaliope. The campaign is a quest for Tillius the Paladin’s soul, but the retired demon overlord Orcus has already traded her soul to the dragon Tiamat, arch nemesis of Tillius. Between D&D sessions Agnes spends a lot of time talking things over with her friend Vera that just so happens to be a guidance counselor at Tilly’s high school. After finding out the Tillius and therefore Tilly is a lesbian she meets the real-life version of Lillith who Tillius was dating in the game, though Lily is very much still in the closet even after having shared a kiss with Tilly in the real world. This prompts Agnes to pay better attention to the parallels of the game with Tilly’s actual life like the cheerleader succubus that represent the popular girls that bullied Tilly for her sexuality. When Lillith dies in the game Agnes nearly quits playing for good but Chuck, the DM, even invites Agnes to meet the actual people Tilly played with inspiring her to finish the quest. Agnes becomes an avid D&D player, gets married, and finds happiness.

 

CHARACTERS

Agnes – 24

Tilly – 15/16

Chuck – High Schooler

Miles – Mid 20s

Kaliope/Kelly – High Schooler, Kaliope has Full Mobility, Kelly has Cerebral Palsy and uses Forearm Crutches

Lillith/Lilly – High Schooler

Vera/Evil Gabbi/The Beholder – Mid 20s+/High Schooler

Narrator/Evil Tina/Farrah – High Schooler

Steve – High Schooler

Orcus/Ronnie – High Schooler

 

POTENTIAL MONOLOGUES

            The only true monologue is Agne’s when explaining to Vera just how little she actually knew Tilly. The narrator does have a few paragraphs of speech, but narration doesn’t work well for monologue work.

 

PERSONAL THOUGHTS

            Perhaps it’s because this play was specifically recommended to me and I had high hopes for it, but reading it was disappointing. This show would be a field day for Costumes, Lights, and Props but the dialogue feels very juvenile. It’s set in the 90s, but “Yo” appears in the script too much to feel like casual period dialogue and characters at times feel like they’re talking with a forced Blaccent despite the play being written by an Asian man that wrote for Raya and the Last Dragon, not to mention how every single opportunity to make a sexual joke is pounced on no matter how out of place or cringy.

            As someone that enjoys D&D, I love the concept of the play and the themes that get explored, but for everything that gets touched on so much feels unresolved by the end of the play. Agnes’s whole family died in the car crash but the affect that her parents’ deaths have on her is never really mentioned. It feels like Nguyen didn’t want to include the parents as characters and saw the crash as an easy way to write them out.

            Then there’s the boyfriend. At no point in the play are his good qualities revealed. Miles is instantly jealous of Agnes spending time with someone else and assumes she’s cheating on him with a high schooler. Vera’s character spends most of her stage time talking about how horrible a boyfriend he is that it takes three years and her family dying for him to invite Agnes to live with him. In the game, Tilly literally imagines him as a blob monster, a gelatinous cube that dissolves the flesh of anything it touches to be specific. When Agnes argues about the way Tilly wrote him, the younger sister claims he touched her and then after shocked silence says that he didn’t but he might have. Agnes calls her on that not being funny and the two descend into bickering, but it’s a strange thing to include in the first place since everything that happens in the campaign is supposed to be Chuck narrating from her DM journal. The comment isn’t brought up again. Throughout the play it feels like Agnes is growing increasingly distant from Miles so it comes as a shock that the play ends mentioning that the two characters got married. It felt like they were setting up so many motifs for Miles to be toxic and not worth Agnes’s affections.

            This feels like it would be a great show for schools except for the number of overtly sexually comments and swearing. I have the 2016 version and I’m a but surprised that it wasn’t edited to be more school friendly, granted that’s not to say that a junior version doesn’t exist. The play as it currently exists isn’t my cup of tea, but that can easily just be me being more critical of it that it was intended to be taken. I do appreciate that Nguyen attempted to write characters that could be played by any race specifically for schools and community theatres. The play is overall a fun story of a young adult trying hard to understand someone through a medium that’s much more whimsical than the character is used to dealing with.