She Kills Monsters at Homegrown Theater

Or: An Evening of Intimate Roleplay

You don’t have to play D&D to be here, but it helps. Homegrown Theater’s foley into the magnificent fantasy of Qui Nguyen’s She Kills Monsters is ticklish and touching, but I found the experience brightened even further by listening at intermission to the conversation fo my fellow patrons, many of them experienced players, rejoicing over some small gem of knowledge, or describing to the uninitiated the properties of a Lich or Owlbear, or talking up the delights of giving your dwarves Minnesotan accents and your elves New Jersey ones.

But She Kills Monsters is more than just a story of sword fights and magic. It’s a story about ghosts. Agnes Evans (Leah Reynolds) a high school teacher in Athens Ohio loses her little sister Tilly (Rachel Giacomino) is a car accident. The only thing left behind of the secret Nerd-Queen of the lands surrounding is a homemade D&D campaign. With the help of local dungeon master Chuck Biggs (Fransisco Negron), Agnes enters the world of Tillius the Paladin, and her wily crew on a quest to fight a shape-shifting dragon and reclaim a lost soul.

Nguyen’s script is a well honed sword of loss and longing, of adventure and triumph, of turning real-world heartbreaker into mythical quests, but sometimes the real world scenes have burrs that needed to be sanded off. Negron juggles those well with his sparkly movements and endless supply of unusual euphemisms, while Janet Lo (as Agnes’s confidant Vera) pours pools of syrupy sarcasm but those burrs still nick the performances and stagger emotional balance of the plot; but in the moments where it matters, of Lich fighting or soul bearing or being tossed through the air by brechtian theatricals and a molly-codlin’ dragon, the production sticks it like a thrown blade.

The many battles, full of chase scenes and decapitations and cruel impalings, are both tense and hilarious and always full of the most unexpected surprises, while the modern day 1995 has its own blend of misadventures (a dramatic lead up offset by fruit roll-up comes to mind). We are treated to a wide host of monsters and nerds from the mad menace of Farrah the Fearsome Faire (Edith Grace Dull) to the misadventures of Steve the Mage (Davie Collins, who’s death twitches are oh so convincing). Reynolds’s leveling up, in power and understanding, unlocks a devilish gleam (plus she can be forced choked like nobody’s business) and Giacomino gives us not only a mighty paladin, a holy warrior and steadfast heart, but also shows us the roots of that tree knotted up in a fifteen-year-old girl, who we see at her mightiest, her most selfish, and her most vulnerable. The final moment, the last reveal, so sweetly blossoms between the two of them: leaving a story of ghosts, grief, and make-believe. Though it would be a lot less awe-inspiring if it weren’t wrapped up in leather armor and carrying a wicked sword.