Why are so many schools doing ‘She Kills Monsters’?
This is a story about kids who make up stories. This is a story in which girls wield swords, queer kids are cool and nerds rule the Earth.
This is a story about “She Kills Monsters” and those who love it.
Qui Nguyen’s spirited play about finding your real and metaphorical families, as well as yourself, through Dungeons & Dragons did well enough when it premiered in 2011 at the Flea Theater in New York City — Eric Grode called it a “deceptively breezy and rather ingenious comedy” in The New York Times. The play ran, closed, and Mr. Nguyen moved on, most notably to his acclaimed semi-autobiographical breakthrough, “Vietgone,” and writing gigs for Disney.
“She Kills Monsters,” meanwhile, had just gotten started. In the intervening years, it has blossomed into one of America’s most popular shows, with 797 productions (performed and planned) between 2013 and next year. Of those, one was a professional revival, 144 were by amateur companies and a whopping 652 were done on school and college campuses.
“We’re dealing with themes that every high schooler, every college student confronts at some point, whether it be this idea of the underdog or familial struggle or sexuality or gender,” said Kelly Trumbull, who is co-directing an online production slated for July 12 at the University of Pittsburgh, where she is a teaching artist. (The live 7:30 p.m. webcast is free; the show will remain available for a small fee until July 26.)
In the show, the teenage Tilly dies early on in a car crash, and her older sister, Agnes, must deal with not just grief but also with how little she knew about her sibling: Reading a notebook left behind, she learns that Tilly was a role-playing aficionado, for instance, and that she had a girlfriend in her game world. (The presence of strong female characters is another big factor for the show’s popularity on campuses, as girls tend to be overrepresented in drama departments.)
These subjects do not fly everywhere, but obstacles have only energized fans of the play. DeAnna Tart, who runs the theater department at Trinidad High School in rural Texas, had to overcome many hurdles before she could enter her production of “She Kills Monsters” in the 2017-18 edition of her state’s University Interscholastic League contest.
“It is very comedic, but it’s also very tragic,” she said by telephone. “It dives into sexuality, which some people deem controversial even for high school-age students, unfortunately.”
Once her principal gave her the green light, Ms. Tart had to follow the contest’s parameters, trimming for length and editing out some curse words while preserving the show’s integrity. “And we won the state championship,” she said. “It was quite awesome.”
Mr. Nguyen, 43, is delighted by
the attention the script has received, even while sounding a little nonplussed.
“I’ve never had a play or anything I’ve ever written take this weird life of its own,” he said on the phone from his Los Angeles home.
Amateur and youth companies started to produce the show. Winning the American Alliance for Theater and Education’s Distinguished Play Award, in 2013, had created a major ping on teachers’ radar, and momentum had built from there, with youth and amateur companies flocking to the show.
Ariana Starkman, 22, who played Tilly at Pitt in 2018, is back for the virtual version. “I definitely love being a badass warrior,” she said.
Annmarie Duggan, chairman of Pitt’s theater arts department, agreed that the chance for women to learn fight choreography is part of the appeal: “They don’t just watch the men fight for them. And there is a love interest, but that’s not what the play is about.”
For Emma Lynch, 18, the gateway was Dungeons & Dragons, which she played at Minarets High School and Charter School in O’Neals, Calif. The show’s humor did the rest.
“The first few pages, I was laughing so hard,” Ms. Lynch said via Zoom. She ended up co-directing a production in May before graduating.
A play toggling between reality and fantasy, and featuring elaborate battles, should be daunting to stage. But Mr. Nguyen, who created the show with his troupe, Vampire Cowboys, purposefully left directors a lot of leeway. And that started with casting.
“I made sure none of the roles were based on race at all,” he said. “We wanted to see the diversity you would find on the New York subway onstage.”
The result is more than just matter-of-fact colorblind casting, as “She Kills Monsters” directly addresses what it means to be an outsider.
“I brought my experiences sometimes being the only Black in the class to Agnes,” said Jasmine Mitchell, 22, who was in a virtual production at the University of Maryland in May. “The person playing Agnes’ boyfriend was white, and I was using this information to figure out her psychology. Agnes’ community at the end is with people from different races, and I think that’s important to acknowledge.”
Role-playing scenes also allow the designer and technical teams to go wild and be resourceful. Kayla West, a teacher and Ms. Lynch’s codirector at Minarets, mailed costumes and props to cast members stuck at home by the coronavirus, along with tablecloths for the virtual backgrounds on Zoom. Proper green screens were too expensive.
“I love them all because it’s so pure, right?” Mr. Nguyen said of the choices he has seen, or heard about, over the years. For its new production, Pitt’s theater department — which wanted students who had lost summer stock jobs to still gain experience on a show — decided to fully embrace a comic-book aesthetic that makes the most of the 2-D platform.
“Everything the audience will see in the imaginary world is something you would see in Tilly’s book, like her drawings and her writing,” Ms. Trumbull, the co-director, said. Some costumes and props are recycled from the university’s 2018 staging, like a horned head piece and cheerleader outfits.
“Hopefully they will fit, or at least close enough,” said Ricardo Vila-Roger, the other co-director. “This is uncharted territory for all of us, and now we problemsolve together.”
Openness, tolerance and resilience are more than the show’s subjects: They are baked into its DNA.
When “She Kills Monsters” started taking off in schools, Mr. Nguyen would receive requests to tone down the profanity and sexual references — what was fine in colleges raised red flags when younger students were involved.
So he retooled the script, tweaking some expressions and altering key elements. For example, Agnes is a teacher in her 20s in the original version and a high school cheerleader in “She Kills Monsters: Young Adventurers Edition,” which now has totaled 434 productions (performed or licensed through 2021).
“The regular play is often done on the coasts, and in the middle it’s the YA edition,” Mr. Nguyen said, laughing. “Oh, I get what’s happening here!”
There was more fine-tuning to come as the show, like a shape-shifter with a high constitution score, has kept on changing.
When stay-at-home orders went up in the spring, directors with planned productions had to scramble. David Marconi of Cranford High School, in New Jersey, started working on an audio version for a podcast.
As Mr. Marconi was editing the sound files, Mr. Nguyen came up with “She Kills Monsters: Virtual Realms,” a version for streaming platforms that the teacher, changing tack again, ended up doing instead.
“Virtual Realms” retrofits the script and stage directions to maximize online formats in clever ways. At the end, for example, Agnes’ battle with a dragon is not represented physically anymore, but by her rolling D&D dice as the beast’s multiple heads appear in different Zoom windows. (Connoisseurs will wince in empathy as the game-master character repeatedly calls “no damage.”)
Lisa Nathans, who co-directed the recent University of Maryland virtual production, was taken with Mr. Nguyen’s flexibility. “Our students were very attached to the original,” she said, “and when ‘Virtual Realms’ became available, Qui very generously allowed the cast to be part of a devising process to blend elements of both stories together.”
The Maryland show, done on Zoom, made particularly impressive use of filters, with characters suddenly sporting digital horns or elf ears. Its audience also testified to the play’s popularity: The livestream had twice as many viewers as a simultaneous YouTube reading of the David Mamet political comedy “November” starring John Malkovich and Patti LuPone.
In “She Kills Monsters,” role-playing helps the sisters finally bond with each other. For many of those staging it, the play serves a similar purpose, especially in a time of social distancing.
“At the end of the show, Tilly asks Agnes, ‘Did you have fun?’ ” Ms. Nathans said. “We used this as guideposts at the end of each rehearsal: ‘Yeah, we’re using this technology, we’re doing this during COVID-19, this is a show about grief, but did you have fun? Were you able to find joy and artistry?’ ”
Such enthusiasm means as much to the playwright as it does to the students. “With professional productions, I remember things, but they didn’t change my life the way the shows I did in high school and college did,” Mr. Nguyen said. “So I’m glad to be part of these people’s artistic journey.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.