Orlando theater review: ‘She Kills Monsters’ scores a critical hit at Valencia

I was socially shunned for my childhood obsessions with tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, so it’s been gratifying to watch mainstream media successes like Stranger Things and Twenty-Sided Tavern make RPGs appealing to a wider audience.

But none of those shows have dug beneath the fantastical surface and delved into D&D’s deep emotional impact on adolescent outsiders quite as effectively as Qui Nguyen’s 2011 award-winning dramedy She Kills Monsters, the eye-popping and -moistening onstage epic now running at Valencia College’s East Campus Black Box through Feb. 24.

As tough as it was on me to be a gaming geek, it would have been exponentially worse for Tilly Evans (Nyaira Beene), a 15-year-old Black girl who was just coming to terms with her sexual orientation before dying with her parents in a tragic preamble. The only thing of Tilly’s left behind for her aggressively ordinary older sister Agnes (Learsi Rivera) to connect with is a custom-made D&D adventure, so she recruits a teenage dungeon master (Michael Sullivan) to guide her through a maze of monsters that feed on her guilt-ridden grief.

I don’t often write about educational theater, but I was drawn to this production by the presence of longtime Phantasmagoria collaborators Bill Warriner (director/stage combat), Dana Mott (projection designer) and Lisa Smith (puppet design).

As anticipated, they have crafted an immersive, visually inventive multimedia experience, bursting with hilariously epic sword-swinging battle scenes (backed by kick-ass rock songs by Meka Nism) which look like Lord of the Rings as reenacted by the cast of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. And whether or not you guffaw out loud at a random Gary Gygax reference, anyone can appreciate a giant man-eating gelatinous cube made from shower curtains, or a deflating beach-ball Beholder descending from the ceiling. (If you are a total newbie, plan to arrive early enough to read Mott’s preshow projections that TL;DR the RPG rulebook.)

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Photos by Chris Bridges for Valencia College Theatre

Cast of ‘She Kills Monsters’ at Valencia East

However, I wasn’t entirely prepared for the razor-sharp comic timing Warriner coaxes out of Steve (Jonah Cottrell), the hapless student, and his harried guidance counselor, Vera (Liv Nunziante), among the script’s other smartly realized characters; the Twin Peaks-loving slacker Orcus (Samuel Wetherbee) and berserk ballerina-fairy Farrah (Dafne Cardena) are also side-splitting standouts. Most importantly, I was completely blindsided by the impressive emotional depths displayed by Rivera’s performance when Agnes confronts her internalized homophobia, nor did I expect how the cathartic Tiamat-slaying finale concluded with such a tear-provoking coda.

She Kills Monsters makes a valid case that role-playing is more than just a game; it’s also a valuable tool for generating empathy. Under Warriner’s direction, Valencia’s version scores a critical hit by honoring outsiders without becoming mere nerdsploitation, while still making audience members roll with laughter whether or not they’ve ever rolled a D20.

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