She Kills Monsters is, in summary, a play based in Athens, Ohio. The year is 1995. Our protagonist, Agnes, is a normal twenty-five-year-old girl who teaches middle school English at the school where her deceased sister, Tilly, used to attend. Agnes discovers Tilly wrote an entire Dungeons and Dragons campaign, so she finds a local nerd named Chuck who helps her play through the campaign, and shenanigans ensue.
I liked the technicals of the performance. I thought it was well cast and costumed, I felt that the director showed his vision for each of the characters in how they looked visually. Each actor played their role well with what they were given, each character felt developed and fleshed out to some extent, or they at least had some reason for being there (i.e. the reason for the character of Steve existing is so that he can be either killed by the D&D creatures or made fun of by the characters and audience). Despite all of this, I enjoyed reading it much more than seeing it on stage. Or perhaps I enjoyed the feeling reading it gave me as opposed to the feeling I felt having watched it.
I found myself confused as to what the theme of this play was in both script and performance formats. It seemed as though it wanted to teach the audience something in both versions, but there is no real lesson to be learned. It's not a cautionary tale in either script or performance, because there is nothing Agnes could have done to prevent the event of her family dying, or her sister hiding certain aspects of who she truly is from her.
In the script, it could work as just a story about a girl's grief; and a good one! Because you can imagine yourself in Agnes's shoes. I was legitimately shocked when I read that her entire family was killed in a car crash, and I imagine Agnes would have been in a similar state of shock as well, just much more intense. As a reader, you can put yourself into the character of Agnes and feel what she feels.
On stage, the story doesn't really have the dramatic element of how Tilly's death affected anyone, even Agnes, whose grief especially needed to get across to the viewers. But it just doesn't. It tries to convey to the audience that Agnes is still haunted by the car crash that killed her family because we see, in the effects, a visual of a car, or sometimes the sounds of horns blaring. But to me, those sounds and effects appeared non-diegetic; meaning that Anges would not see or hear them, only the audience would. However, we as the audience are not ever meant to care that the real Tilly is dead, Agnes is. And I don't feel that was shown well in the performance (not necessarily by the fault of the actress).
Another problem I had with the performance was the consequence of Tillius the Paladin being all both audiences see of the real Tilly. Until the end of the performance, we are with Tillius the whole time. But in the last scene, we see the real Tilly, she and Tillius are just the same person, with the exact same personality in different clothes. This contrasts with all of her friends we meet in the final act, whose D&D personas are far different from their real-life selves. The Tilly at the ending should be the Tilly that Agnes has known all her life, the one she identifies with, the one she loves; and Tillius should just be a version of Tilly that is what she wants herself to be. But again, they're never distinguished as being any different aside from that one has a sword and lives in the D&D world, and one does not, which makes the emotions the last scene is trying to convey fall flat on stage.
It also rushes over the car crash at the beginning of the plot, which makes it much harder for the performers to get us to care about it again later on. Especially when there are so many comedic and wacky moments with swords and music and monsters and effects in between. Whereas reading it, I found it much easier for myself to revisit those darker emotions when the story would bring them up again.
All in all, She Kills Monsters is a comedy about a girl who discovers D&D, uses it to communicate (in a way) with her dead sister and learns more about her through playing the game, with funny moments, goofs, and gaffs scattered all throughout.
