RWU StageCo’s newest production, She Kills Monsters, is a story about the amazing power of geek culture and how it brings people together. Written by Qui Nguyen and directed by Lori Lee Wallace, the play follows Agnes, a teacher who tries out Dungeons and Dragons for the first time in the hopes of reconnecting with a part of her now deceased younger sister. Throughout the show, we both laugh ourselves to death as Agnes encounters absurd characters and situations, but also feel with her as she sees parts of her sister that she didn’t know existed through her D & D module, and discovers why this “immature” thing meant so much to her. 

The story immediately introduces us to two sisters, Agnes and Tilly, who live in Athens, Ohio. Agnes is the older sister who is into more conventional things like boys, movies, pop music, etc. Meanwhile, Tilly is into more nerdy things like D & D and cosplay. Unfortunately, Tilly is killed in a car accident, and as Agnes is going through her sister’s old stuff, she finds a D & D module that she wrote. Hoping to reconnect with her sister who walked in a completely different world, Agnes brings the module to Chuck, a high school student that Tilly frequently did campaigns with. As the two begin to bring the module to life, Agnes gets a window into her sister’s world, both within D & D and in the real world, and she begins to realize and come to terms with just how little she knew of her sister while she was still alive, but is given a chance to connect with her again through this game.

She Kills Monsters is a comedic play, so it’s obviously filled to the brim with hilarious dialogue. The opening narration immediately sets the tone for the show perfectly, with hilarious geeky references and punctuating itself with a hilariously dark joke when Agnes begs for her life to be less boring, and one of the narrators responds, “The gods answered her wish, by smiting all of her loved ones in a mighty car crash,” which triggered both laughter and gasps from the audience. The fantastic jokes continue throughout the show, and all of them are possible through the fantastic comedic timing and delivery of its cast. Joe Lefebure as Chuck has some amazing joke deliveries, such as when he has a conversation with Agnes’s boyfriend about how, “I keep her pretty busy y’know?” and how “We just role play”, with Lefebure playing up the innuendo of the lines perfectly. Destiny Gonzalez as Agnes also gets amazingly funny lines which she delivered excellently. For example, when the D & D characters ask Agnes what her moral alignment is in D & D, she responds with hilarious befuddlement, “I’m a democrat.” Another great moment is when Agnes and Tilly get themselves into a combat situation early on in the show with Tilly saying “You’ll die five seconds into it” and Agnes responding with amazing sass, “Well, at least we’ll have something in common.” But without question, the actor who got the biggest reaction from the audience was Samuel Goddard as Orcus, who is a minor antagonistic character in the D & D campaign. All of his dialogue got laughs, but his best line and delivery comes in a bit where it’s revealed that everybody in this D & D world is gay, he immaculately delivers the line, “I loves me the cock,” which single-handed paused the show as the audience exploded with both laughter and applause. All of the remaining actors, including Iliana Salinas as Tilly, Luke Gibbons as Miles, Sophie Dervishian as Kalaiope, Taryn Bannon as Lillith, Emma Adams as Vera, Elena Morasca as Evil Gabby, Bella Carle as Evil Tina, Joshua Peak as Steve, Arrianne Cox as Farrah, and Caitlin Stanley and Nattea Mckenna as Ensemble, are all as well given great lines that are delivered in fantastic fashion. The actors and dialogue combined gave the play such amazing comedy that continuously had the audience continuously laughing.

The dialogue was not the only element of comedy that was used to spectacular effect. This play had great physical gags, both running and singular, which are very well executed despite the play itself having a very minimal set. A hilarious running gag is the great mage Steve constantly getting easily (and often brutally) defeated by the various magical entities that our main characters encounter along their D & D journey. This gets even funnier when the story cuts back to the real world and his counterpart in that setting is getting the exact same treatment from people. Another great gag is, because of its minimal set, stage transitions are announced with big paper signs that are carried across the stage by several characters, with each of these signs having great designs and hilarious visual gags. And these transitions are accompanied by a preexisting song playing over it, which excellently punctuates the moment. While the set may not have been very extensive, the cast’s usage of props such as weapons was great, being both comedic and serious when it needed to be, and overall just being very well-choreographed. 

While She Kills Monsters is first and foremost a comedy, underneath all of its jokes and gags is a genuinely heartfelt story about someone reconnecting with a lost loved one. Agnes and Tilly walked in completely different worlds from one another, with Agnes never really getting to know her sister. But this trip into Tilly’s D & D module shows Agnes just how much she missed about her sister’s life. This show has a great dynamic where Agnes begins to discover that the things Tilly wrote into her fantasy world correspond to things that existed in the real world. For example, Tilly’s love interest in the game Lillith, directly corresponded to a girl she’d had feelings for in the real world, and all of this was something Agnes had never even known about when Tilly was alive. There’s a fantastic scene that merges the real and fantasy worlds of the show together, where Chuck as the dungeon master in the real world and Tilly as her character in the fantasy world are sharing Tilly’s emotions to Agnes, with both characters saying the same dialogue at the same time, effectively showing how Agnes is interpreting the dialogue that Chuck’s reading in the real world to be Tilly’s words. In addition, there’s a great subplot where Agnes tries to encounter Tilly’s world outside of the D & D by meeting the people that correspond to the characters in the game, including the girl she’d had feelings for, her bullies whom she made into enemies in the game, and even some of her fellow D & D players who shared her passion for this activity and miss her now that she’s gone. By the end of the show, Agnes walks away from the campaign with a better understanding of her sister, and the narrators tell us that she would go on to play D & D for years to come afterwards. 

She Kills Monsters was a hilarious and heartfelt show, brought together by a great script and fantastic performances from each and every one of its actors, as well as the hard work of its crew. When asked about her experiences working on the show, stage manager Stella Driscoll said, “It was very fun, I had so much fun doing it. There were a lot of challenges that were our way that we had to deal with, but it just made us as a cast and as a group come out stronger. It was absolutely amazing and so much fun and I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.” Theater can be a challenging process, but more often than not, the end results, such as those of She Kills Monsters, are more than worth it.