Qui Nguyen’s play, She Kills Monsters, develops its plot around the fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons. I know nothing about Dungeons and Dragons except that it was very popular in the ’80s and ’90s among people a couple of generations younger than I, especially, I think, among the geeks and nerds in the pre-video game era. It gave them a community and an identity that they often didn’t find in mainstream teen culture. 

I also don’t understand how the real world relates to the world of the game. That’s crucial in She Kills Monsters.

In 1995 Agnes is a 25-year-old teacher in the high school she attended in Athens, Ohio. Fortunately, she knows nothing about Dungeons and Dragons, so I learn about it as she does, which helps me to follow the story. Agnes learns about it because she discovers among her sister Tilly’s papers a kind of scenario for a game of D&D. Tilly and her and Agnes’s parents were killed in a car accident some three years earlier. Agnes was not close to the decade-younger Tilly; they shared no common interests. Thanks to the D&D module, Agnes learns that not only did Tilly play the game, she was a master at it. Hoping to learn more about her late sister, Agnes recruits Chuck, a nerdy high school student and also a D&D master, to guide her through the game that Tilly created.

When Agnes starts to play the game, she finds herself in an alternate universe where not only can she learn more about her sister but her sister is there, alive – or whatever her current state is. Tilly is also a fierce warrior in the battles that she and her friends fight against demons and dragons. Thanks to costume designer Dominique Green and props designer Emily Frei the evil creatures are quite extravagantly grotesque and bear a variety of sharp-edged slicers and pointed skewers. Melissa Freilich has designed for them pulse-raising fight choreography, just long enough to be exciting, precisely executed by the actors. Tilly and her friends always win.

Between episodes of the game, Agnes returns to her job at the high school, where Tilly had also been a student, as are some of her friends. Agnes began to recognize their resemblance to some of the players in Tilly’s game. One young person in particular, Lilly in the high school, is Lilith Morningstar, a Demon Queen in the game and, Agnes discovers, Tilly’s lover. At the high school, when Agnes questions her, Lilly admits that she and Tilly once kissed.

Agnes realizes that the adolescent Tilly was struggling with her sexuality. In the game, she could be an out lesbian. In high school, she was barely beginning to come out of the closet. 

At the Edison Theatre, Naomi Blair’s Agnes moves from mild curiosity to a firm determination to find out all she can about her sister. Raevyn Ferguson’s Tilly is clearly the master in her universe. And Steven Reaugh’s Chuck relishes being the master of the game in the real world as he guides Agnes through it. Dylan McKenna plays Agnes’s boyfriend who becomes in the game a creeping big cardboard box whom Agnes slays, and Andre Harte, Steve in school, becomes a minor mage who is killed multiple times—that’s how the game plays. Brenna Jones and Sarah Wilkinson, daintily dressed, become evil faeries who attack Tilly and her friends, just as their counterparts had bullied her in high school. Jones is also Agnes’s friend Vera the high school counselor, and Wilkinson is also a major Faerie and a very clearly spoken Narrator. Ella Sherlock twirls a mean stave as the Dark Elf Kalliope, Tilly’s sidekick and in high school her friend, and her brother Ronnie, played by Jake Steinburg, becomes a muscular, bare-chested, horned Orcus, Demon Overlord of the Underworld, a splendid figure. Sofia McGrath, Caitlin Souers, and Bela Marcus appear when monsters are to be slain.

Patrick Huber’s set has levels and open spaces for exciting battles, quiet corners, and two white panels that appear and disappear to display Cllementine Huck’s illustrations. Lara Kling designed the lighting, Benjamin Lewis the sound, Nathaniel Holmes choreographed the dances. Director William Whitaker blends all of these masterfully, as always, into an extravagant feast of theatre, though you might be hungry again in a couple of hours.

—Bob Wilcox

Photo by Danny Reise/Washington University