‘Monsters’ a huge, geeky triumph
‘Dungeons and Dragons’ meets ’90s pop culture
Even if you never played “Dungeons and Dragons” (but much more so if you did), there may be multiple levels of nostalgia involved in seeing “She Kills Monsters” at La Val’s Subterranean Theater. This show is the first Actors Ensemble of Berkeley production at La Val’s, but the North Berkeley pizza parlor basement has been home to several theater companies over the years, including Shotgun Players, Subterranean Shakespeare, Impact Theatre and currently Theatre Lunatico. This raucous “D&D” romp by Qui Nguyen feels particularly like the sort of play that Impact specialized in during its 20 years in the space. Although written in 2011, Nguyen’s play is steeped in the 1990s, when the internet was still just a slow and clunky novelty. That particular time is perfectly evoked in some of the ’90s hip-hop hits as fight music and video game and modem sounds pervading Hayden Kirschbaum’s sound design as well as in some of choreographer Emily Simso’s sweet dance moves. Arkansas native Nguyen may be best known today for his delightfully offbeat, hip-hop laced Vietnamese refugee family saga “Vietgone” and its upcoming sequel “Poor Yella Rednecks,” but his previous plays are largely madcap geek theater full of superheroes, martial arts and zombies, and “She Kills Monsters” is a delightful example. The backstory is rather grim. Young schoolteacher Agnes Evans, a tediously normal person with a tediously normal life, suddenly finds that her entire family has been killed in a car accident. She’s particularly haunted by the loss of her teenage sister, Tilly, with whom she never found a way to connect. When she finds a notebook of a “D&D” adventure that Tilly created, she enlists the aid of a high school dungeon master to lead her into the fantasy world where Tilly felt most at home. Thoroughly entertaining from beginning to end, director Kayla Minton Kaufman’s staging for Actors Ensemble keeps things simple on the production side. The black box space is unadorned by scenery, and Nathaniel J. Bice’s amusing shadow puppet projections are placed on a classroomstyle overhead projector. Joyce Domanico-Huh makes a nicely funny and sympathetic lead as Agnes, low-key and befuddled by all the weirdness around her but gamely carrying on. She’s well-paired with Jaqueline Wolfe’s lively and charismatic Tilly — or, rather, Tillius the Paladin, her gaming persona, who’s nonetheless aware of her real-life connection to Agnes and the realworld equivalents of other characters. Their party of scantily clad adventurers is made up of Raquel Orendáin Shrestha as fierce dominatrix demon warrior Lilith, Kristin Louie as the plain-spoken ethereal elf mage Kaliope and Patrick Glenn as the comically laid-back slacker dude demon lord Orcus. Dylan Barrows makes an amusingly seedy dungeon master as Chuck, with an overinflated sense of his own charisma. That leads to some comically awkward clashes with Miles, Agnes’ baffled boyfriend, portrayed with hotheaded machismo by Peter Malmquist. It’s hard to know whether or not to root for the relationship to work out, as Miles is sometimes a jerk and sometimes tries endearingly hard to connect. Agnes’ only other realworld connection is her friend Vera, a high school guidance counselor, played by Vicki Victoria with impatient disregard for her students’ dilemmas. Gertrudis “Tru” Colon plays the dramatic narrator (a bit too quietly on opening night) as well as an entertaining array of fantasy monsters, teaming with Victoria as a taunting mean-girl pair of cheerleader succubi. Amanda Bailey has a hilarious running gag as the Great Mage Steve, an unrelated adventurer who keeps blundering into the party’s face-offs with various monsters and being promptly dispatched. A lot of the fun comes in the fanciful fantasy character and monster designs, wonderfully captured in Lyre Alston’s costumes and Bice’s props, and the grand battles choreographed by Josephine Czarnecki are a riot. For a small-scale production of a quirky comedy, it’s an awfully big and triumphant adventure.