Next year, I want to use the play “She Kills Monsters” by Qui Nguyen as the basis for my director’s notebook project. I learned about this play from a performance Mr. Marshall’s son Dave participated in at his college this past year, and I found it incredibly funny and creative, and at times surprisingly relatable. The plot follows young adult Agnes Evans as she attempts to cope with the death of her nerdy teenage sister Tilly through experiencing Tilly’s hidden hobby, the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, for the first time. By playing the game with Tilly’s friends, Agnes comes to learn more about them, her sister, and herself, while gaining a new appreciation for the kind of obscure escapist fantasies Tilly found her refuge in. The show covers themes of family, mourning, secrets, understanding and appreciating others, and escape into fantasy. There is also a large focus on homosexuality as part of the plot, as and the topic is treated with due respect the whole way through.
The fun part of doing a director’s notebook for this play will be imagining all of the scenes that take place within the game world. The stage type will have to allow for multiple scene changes in order to create different fantasy locals, such as an enchanted forest and an ancient castle. The outfits for the characters’ in-game personas could be done in a way similar to how the recent Broadway revival of “Once on this Island” handled the costumes for the gods. In that show, the gods have three “levels” of costume: their regular islander outfits, their full god outfits, and an in-between stage. With “She Kills Monsters”, when Agnes is first trying out Dungeons and Dragons, the costumes her other party members wear could be pretty simple, almost looking as though they’ve been thrown together from whatever was around, while still portraying the general idea of what each character is supposed to be (an elf warrior, a fiery lustful demon, etc.). Then as Agnes develops more investment in the game, the characters’ outfits can become more complex, so that by the end they would end up seeming as though they came straight from a fantasy video game. There are a lot of photographs easily found online of other productions that I could look over for potential inspiration (though of course I would never directly copy any of them).
Of course the player characters are not the only magical beings in the world of Dungeons and Dragons - there are also all of the enemy monsters the team has to face, from common generic creatures like goblins to giant bosses, such as the four-headed dragon known as Tiamat who serves as the final boss of the campaign. The performance I saw of this play brought these beings to life on stage through a combination of extras in consumes and puppetry, which I feel would also be necessary for my version. Even though the monsters are all pre-established Dungeons & Dragons characters, there is always room for slight artistic embellishments. I think that this show will be a ton of fun to do a Director’s Notebook for, as I genuinely enjoyed the show and its characters, and the premise and plot allow for a lot of creativity when it comes to the technical aspects of theater.
