She Kills Monsters Review
By Stephen C Walls II
On November 20th, 2016 I went to the Robinson Theater on campus to see the play She Kills Monsters written by Qui Nguyen and directed by Allison Amidei. I wasn’t as excited to go see this play as I was to go see the karate movie at the Charlotte film festival mainly because I’ve hardly ever gone to any plays that I can remember. The only one I can really remember is going to see a Nativity play with my grandparents when I was little, and that wasn’t much by choice considering they are both ministers. I tried to not let that experience affect how I looked at this play and tried my best to enjoy and observe the play with a clear mind.
A little about the plot, Agnes Evans’ family died when she had just graduated from high school. It seems to be about four years later and she finds herself working at the same high school where she and her sister went; where now her sister’s class is just about to graduate. Agnes is going through her sister’s old things where she finds a D&D manual her sister wrote, and after finding someone to help her play through it she finds herself learning things about her sister and some of her sister’s friends that she never even thought to expect. She plays through the game with her sister’s character by her side and when she finally beats it, it feels like she finally can get the closure she needed about her sister’s death.
All the changes the author made helped the game inside the play made it feel fluid. At the beginning of the play I was semi-worried about how it might go because they started with a fight scene showing off Tilly’s D&D character, and they look bad are far as fight scenes go but I also think that was partly my fault because I have gotten so use to fights in movies and they skewed how I thought they would look in the play. As the play kept going they fight scenes got remarkably better so I came to the conclusion that the fight scenes from the beginning were purely made to be flashy and leave an impression on the audience. Which in hind sight seemed like a good idea because it made everything else look better by comparison. I also really like the revolving set pieces to create new scenes for the play to take place in. I feel like the set designer really did well with them; one of them even had a collapsible table which I though was a cool idea to incorporate into the sets for the play. I really thought it was hilarious how they tried their best to put obscure 90’s references into the play whenever they could; like the old-school cd’s, one of the teachers had a Poison tattoo, and some old TV show references. I felt like all the 90’s references made it all really retrospective to the audience. Even though I was born in the tail end of the 90’s everything I can remember about my childhood originated in some way shape or form in the 90’s.