Available Light has its first home-run of the season with Ian Short’s production of Qui Nguyen’s She Kills Monsters.
The play picks up in 1995, a couple years after Agnes Evans’ (Krista Lively Stauffer) younger sister and parents were killed in a car accident near Athens, Ohio, where she’s teaching at her high school alma mater. It’s the year her sister would have been a senior, and she’s finally decided to clean out Tilly’s (Kimberly Martin) room. Agnes is wracked with guilt at not knowing Tilly and tries to find a way in through her sister’s art, such as it is: a handmade module for Dungeons and Dragons. Her ally in this is her sister’s friend Chuck Biggs (Mark Hale), recruited to Dungeon Master (DM) the module, and in doing so interpret Tilly’s funhouse-mirror fantasy take on her life, a life Agnes didn’t have a part in.
The play runs on parallel tracks. One of these is the game brought to life, a journey to fight the Tiamat (well-known in D&D lore) to recover “The Lost Soul of Athens,” with Biggs rolling dice behind a DM screen at the corner of the stage while fantasy action unfolds with Agnes as a direct participant. These scenes include the adventuring party Tilly created: herself as leader, demon-goddess Lillith (Laura Crone), elf warrior maiden Kalliope (Allison Brogan), and slacker demon Orcus (Jordan Fehr). It’s also peopled with non-player characters, including classic monsters from D&D like the Beholder and the Gelatinous Cube, and more personal riffs like The Great Mage Steve (Daniel Shtivelberg) and succubi cheerleaders Evil Tina (Whitney Thomas Eads) and Evil Gabi (Emma Lou Andrews).
As with any good fantasy literature (or the approximation of it around a gaming table), there’s a strong subtext of what the sisters never talked about. Any journey, at its heart, is a journey to know yourself and the world. That’s what makes those games addictive, and what makes them fascinating even after you grow out of being able to schedule an entire Saturday around it every week.
The mirroring scenes involve Agnes trying to unpack the personal revelations coming at her with her best friend Vera (Whitney Thomas Eads), her boyfriend Miles (Adam Humphrey), and real-life analogues for the teenagers she interacted with in the game. The journey is subtler here, but never far from the audience’s mind.
What makes this play appealing is that the characters are drawn clearly and cleanly, the sharp edges and laughter are not forced, everyone feels like someone you grew up around. Almost as important in getting She Kills Monsters over is the homespun quality of the fantasy elements. Sometimes you have a placeholder like “mountains of steepness” to get back to later and, as the play gently reminds us, sometimes the world makes the placeholder have to suffice. The use of metaphor is sophistication in the sheep’s clothing of childlike effort, and that makes it stab your heart even deeper. The action sequences are genuinely exciting and pulse-pounding, but they retain the joy of randomness and working around the rolls of the dice. At the same time, the play avoids the overdone “geek pride” qualities that have driven me out of the room (or at least sent my eyes rolling) in similarly themed work. It appreciates the “normal” life – people baffled by these hobbies aren’t mundane – and it understands and honors the joy of living in the world while still keeping a piece of something for yourself.
Maybe the hardest thing to depict in theater or film or fiction is the “average” person. The viewpoint character here, Agnes, fits the bill; she is even referred to as average in the introductory narration. The calm center in the midst of the swirling craziness, without any tics or outwardly identifying characteristics – wearing average clothes from the era, lovely but not in an immediately memorable way, smart but not overly demonstrative – what Krista Lively Stauffer does is an impressive feat. She projects an unawareness of Dungeons and Dragons terminology without seeming dumb, and imbues the character’s grief with shadings of humor and charm. She makes Agnes charming, likeable, and a proper hero of the piece.
In the “real world,” Whitney Thomas Eads is spot-on as Agnes’ foil, the friend as lantern-holding truth-teller and the high school counselor who seems a little distracted by her own 20s. But there’s a definite sense that she’s a solid friend and good at her job, a nuanced depiction with very few strokes. The third leg of Agnes’ real-life trinity is Adam Humphrey as Miles, and while the character (rightly) gets less stage time, Humphrey is an important grounding and counter-balance. He’s the most tangible evidence that the world does, in fact, move on.
The fantasy characters also rise above cliché and sell all facets of who they are. Kimberly Martin’s Tilly is the rock of the adventuring party, working in a circumscribed range but making sure there’s never a moment you don’t believe people would follow her to their doom or their salvation. Mark Hale’s Biggs is a character I recognized immediately – the sarcastic pop-culture maven and charismatic personality hiding his insecurities with bluster and sometimes ham-fisted wit – and he avoids playing a cartoon or going for easy heartstring tugging. Laura Crone’s Lillith/Lilly also takes an obvious trope, the heavily sexualized barbarian princess, and makes it not only breathe but sing; there’s both a physical energy and a sly wit that make it impossible to not watch her when she’s on stage. Allison Brogan’s Kalliope/Kelli isn’t far off; she has less to do but is very affecting. As Orcus, Jordan Fehr continues an incredible hot streak this year with his easy-going but very-intense-about-certain-things-like-TV-shows demeanor, which resonated with me from that time in my life, and he gets the biggest laughs in a show full of surprising humor.
Ian Short’s direction is perfect. He keeps everything in play and subtly weights it as appropriate, he buries some sight gags in a way that gets a bigger laugh that ripples through the audience as people notice, and he keeps a grounded, emotional reality at the forefront.
Props should go to all the technical elements. Much as the play hides a gorgeous beating heart in a fantasy candy coating, She Kills Monsters continues this year’s trend at Available Light of hiding sophisticated technical work inside the boisterous joy of “let’s put on a show in this old barn.”
Julia Ferreri’s costumes are eye-catching and genre-appropriate while not feeling too slick, keeping in line with the ramshackle quality of the game, and her “real world” choices firmly ground us in the mid-90s while not looking like a Saturday Night Live sketch, aided by Brad Steinmetz’s minimal scenic design. Chelsie McPhilimy’s lighting and Dave Wallingford’s sound work hand-in-glove and do a lot of the work in delineating which track we’re on, drawing attention to what’s important. Whitney Thomas Eads and Jason Speicher’s choreography and fight choreography also keep the audience focused on what’s important and work better than usually seen in a play of this size.
If you ever used your fantasy life as a way to find yourself or understand other people (and I think that’s just about everybody), go see this right now. Go early, go often, and take all your friends. This is AVLT doing what they do better than anyone else in town at the height of their powers. Especially for anyone who has an inner geek that once got, or still gets, well-exercised, carve a couple hours out of this busy holiday season and see this.
She Kills Monsters continues performances through Saturday, December 20th. Shows at 8pm. For tickets and information, visit AVLTheatre.com.