Of swords, sorcery and sisters
Play battles grief with help of a game of fantasy
Ayoung woman plunges into the world of Dungeons & Dragons as a means to explore the psyche of her younger sister, whom she mostly ignored before her death at age 15 — and you can see the action on stage, complete with dragons and sword fights.
“She Kills Monsters,” a 2012 play by Qui Nguyen, is being performed at the Santa Fe Playhouse for the next three weekends and director Malcolm Morgan says it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen there before.
Just as in the game, the show moves incredibly quickly, with action shifting in a second from the world inhabited by fairies and ogres to the world of everyday reality. “She stabs a monster and it dies — and then it cuts back into the real world,” with the main character heading to her job teaching at her sister’s school, for instance, Morgan said. “There were challenges in figuring out the blocking and tech.”
The story starts, he said, when Agnes is moving out of the house after the deaths of her parents and her younger sister, Tilly. Sifting through the contents of her sister’s room, she comes across her Dungeons & Dragons module — a notebook that explains who the characters are in her game, how they are directed by the Dungeon Master, who are friends and who are enemies.
Agnes realizes how oblivious she had been to Tilly and her world, and heads to a comic book store in search of someone to help her figure out the notebooks and teach her how to plunge into the game in hopes of understanding her dead sister. Those characters all come alive on stage, Morgan said, including those played by Tilly. To keep her sister alive, Agnes keeps
going deeper into the D&D fantasy.
“It’s a deep dive into someone’s psyche,” Morgan said.
“In the end, Tilly’s soul has gone missing,” he said. “In the very last scene, Agnes has to fight the dragon to win back her sister’s soul. ... Finally, she knows her little sister in a way she always wanted to.”
But that doesn’t change the fact that Tilly still is dead, a fact that mixes tears with the humor and adventure of the show.
Morgan said he was not familiar with D&D himself, but the costume designer’s daughter-in-law, Aileen Mell, actually is a Dungeon Master living in Santa Fe, so she hosted cast members for a game while he observed.
“It’s very interesting,” he said. “It’s storytelling along with acting and thinking on your feet. It requires a lot of thought and imagination to get yourself out of different conundrums.”
Morgan said he thinks the story is trying to say “take the opportunity to get to know people when you have the time, when they’re there,” instead of focusing on things that, in retrospect, are not as important.
“There’s a lot of bullying in the show,” he added. “It’s a very relevant story today.”
A graduate of the Santa Fe University of Arts and Design and currently working in its admissions office, Morgan said the 14-member cast requires a lot of young people; 13 of them are either SFUAD alumni or current students. The tech crew also includes a number of SFUAD alumni, he added.
“That is something I really appreciated,” he said. Playhouse artistic director Vaughn Irving has made the effort to bring youth into the Santa Fe theater scene, Morgan said.
This is the first off-campus play he has directed, although Morgan said he either directed or helped direct some four plays at the university, along with some drag shows. (Morgan’s online profile at SFUAD quotes him saying, “I love to entertain and am known as the Hostess with the Mostess.”)
Launching his first off-campus directing gig is “scary,” Morgan said. “It’s a whole new venue, a whole new set of people I haven’t worked with.”
He said he hopes the play attracts an expanded set of audience members, bringing in more young people and indie-minded artists, along with the ongoing Playhouse patrons interested in exploring something new.
“There’s lot of stage combat,” he said. “The show will leave you laughing and a little bit in tears.”