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Get as Close as You Can to “She Kills Monsters”

Review: She Kills Monsters at the Parr Center

By Perry Tannenbaum

When you think about it, not too many comic books get to be adapted into plays or musicals. Movies and TV seem to be the hallowed afterlife of superheroes and Marvel headliners – except for that regrettable Spiderman the Musical fiasco. Only video games, if memory serves, make it to the big screen. But never to a live stage. Monopoly, Chutes & Ladders, and other pop culture board games were similarly neglected until Clue proved that it could have legs onstage.

So now we have playwright-director-choreographer Qui Nguyen’s She Kills Monsters, inspired by the legendary Dungeons & Dragons board game, onstage in Charlotte for at least the third time in the last 10 years, beginning with a UNC Charlotte production in 2016. In some ways, the current Central Piedmont Theatre production is an upgrade from the 2022 version presented at the Arts Factory by Charlotte’s Off-Broadway.

The bigger, newer Parr Center offers the spaciousness for scenic-and-projections designer James Duke to make Nguyen’s spectacle more spectacular. In cahoots with lighting designer Jeff Childs, costume designer Freddie Harward and prop designer Maxwell Martin have the equipment and budget to splash additional color across the Parr stage. Add the sound designs of Montavious Blocker and Carly McMinn and you have a sensory-rich fantasy brew.

To stage his own scripts and bring martial arts action into live theatre, Nguyen established the Vampire Cowboys Theatre Company in 2000 – and himself as the godfather of “Geek Theatre.” Presumably, he was convinced stage combat and martial arts could be a more visceral experience in live performance than it is on film, even if the resources of slow-motion photography, AI, and animation had to be tossed aside.

Much of Nguyen’s geekery can be comic book silliness and free-range Gothic imagination, delighting as much in creating outré villains as in birthing super-powered heroes – with a smattering of witchery and magic on both sides. What makes She Kills Monsters especially clever and brilliant is Nguyen’s use of Dungeons & Dragons as a game within a drama. His hero, Agnes Evans, uses D&D as a tool to recover the essence of her younger sister Tilly after her untimely death.

You will wonder how this can be possible if you don’t already know that D&D can be deeply and extensively personalized. You can create your own module for the game and envision heroes and monsters based on your own friends and enemies: a wonderful way for high school teens to vent their thwarted loves and seething hates.

Key example: Tilly, venerated as Tillius the Paladin among D&D geeks in Athens, Ohio, was jealous of her elder sister’s boyfriend, Miles. So along the path of Tilly’s scenario, Agnes will discover that Miles is a villainous force who must be vanquished, even though the evildoer has been imprisoned in a huge gelatinous cube.

That discovery will pale in comparison with the discoveries Agnes makes about Tilly’s sexuality. Geeks are merging with Greeks in Athens, as Nguyen is quite aware, so his female warriors will not be as straight as Homer’s Amazons.

Nor can Nguyen’s Athens be down in Georgia, for he has ordained that Agnes is average – the birthright of all Ohio citizens. For Agnes, it’s a journey into the underworld just to meet Chuck, who will serve as Dungeon Master for the surviving sister while entrusted with the precious posthumous work of Tillius the Paladin.

Layered onto all this teen angst (Tilly’s) and Agnes’s quest to recover her dead sister’s lost soul – both in the D&D game and in real life – is another Narrator, a high school guidance counselor, and numerous mundane classmates that Tilly has mirrored and immortalized in “The Lost Soul of Athens.” My picks for most lethal are the Athens High cheerleaders, Tina and Gabbi, turned into succubi in the D&D realm.

Carly McMinn directs the show, immersing herself and her cast in the action to a fault. I’m not sure McMinn sat herself more than three rows away from her players during rehearsals at the Parr Center. By the time Nguyen’s words reached my party in Row G, much of the Vietnamese playwright’s snappy dialogue had become unintelligible.

Get as close as you can if you wish to hear as joyfully as you’ll see.

If you don’t mind experiencing She Kills Monsters like Greek drama, knowing the plot beforehand, you can freely read and/or download the script online. Otherwise, you’re adding the Neil Simon layer afterward. If at all.

Generally speaking, the vaunts, boasts, and challenges within the game are louder than the conversations inside Agnes’s apartment, Chuck’s store, or the guidance counselor’s office – and more often competing with the soundtrack, which is not at all Dean Martin. Is it Beck’s “Loser” or LL Cool J’s “Mama Say Knock You Out” or Smashing Pumpkins as suggested by the script? Couldn’t say.

McMinn and her choreographers capture the spirit of Agnes’s odyssey beautifully, true to Nguyen’s saucy mix of fantasy and reality, silliness and profundity, fun and feeling, play and play. Fight choreographer Elizabeth Sickerman and dance battle choreographer Becky Rooney both grasp the double layer of artificiality that protects us from viewing violence, injury, blood, or death in the D&D world as any more serious than AEW on TNT.

But unlike AEW, Sickerman and Rooney can take advantage of the outright artifice for comedic purposes. How bad is it, then, if Tillius the Paladin wields her mighty sword – The Eastern Blade of the Dreamwalker, forged from the fiery nightmares of Gods and blessed by the demons of Pena – and slashes at a Bugbear, missing her target by two yards? Not at all. Especially if the Bugbear is mortally wounded anyway. Or if any other fearsome adversary writhes in agony, breathing its last for no apparent reason.

A little of this ridiculous fakery goes a long way.

To be fair, if McMinn doesn’t have her protagonists consistently declaiming at sufficient decibels, she has the wisdom to see that their character arcs are moving in opposite directions to make reconciliation – or even acquaintanceship – possible. Nguyen takes more care with the nuances of Agnes’s evolution since it’s moving in parallel directions in altering her relationships with Tilly and with Miles.

So Saskia Lewis as Agnes has a bunch of calibrating to do as she moves from average and static to insightful and savage. Lewis must be awkward for a while with her blade, shield, and helmet before Agnes the Ass-hatted can morph into Agnes the Badass. She also goes through gauche stages with Miles, with Vera the guidance counselor, and her squeamish attitude toward Chuck (some of it quite warranted).

It’s a curve that Lewis delineates well, though she never quite figures out how to give Average Agnes any spark or gusto. A little dopiness might do it. Or a little surprise when Agnes discovers she can have fun.

Whether or not McMinn saw the 2022 Monsters at the Arts Factory, she and Claire Grant demonstrate that less can be more in portraying Tilly and Tillius. Grant is never quite the legend Charlie Grass was as Tillius in 2022. There is no warpaint on Grant. You might even catch her slouching once or twice. She is mighty, yes, but we also see her as vulnerable. This Tillius is one that Agnes can envision, not the invincible Tilly she wants her to see.

Very likely, Brian DeDora was mostly enticed by the monster-in-gelatinous-cube side of Miles when he auditioned for the role, but I couldn’t help liking him even more as the wholesome boyfriend. Nguyen gives DeDora a wonderful pathway into making mundane Miles likable, for he earnestly wants to be a part of the D&D fun and fantasy once Agnes has gotten the bug.

Aside from Kameal Brown as the guidance counselor, slightly tainted by adulthood, all the other women get to revel in D&D nastiness and badassery. My favorite is Ashlie Hanke as Lilith Morningstar, Tilly’s right-hand fantasy demon, followed closely by Anaiah Jones and Kristina Ishihara as the Evil cheerleader succubi.

Hanke gets the best crossover into reality as Lily, more closeted at Athens High than Tilly. To Hanke’s credit, Lily is poignantly burdened with the sad consequences of spurning real-life Tilly to keep her cover. When they aren’t tormenting Tillius & Crew as succubi, Jones and Ishihara can tag-team Tilly, cruelly teasing her over her sexuality. Even if they’re a bit stereotyped as cheerleaders, they make Athens High more real.

All three of these wicked slayers are radically red-faced in New Landia, the country where Tillius tries to recover her lost soul. Their having to un-paint and repaint is the only good excuse I can imagine to explain why everyone onstage isn’t miked. So for me, it’s a love-hate relationship with these vicious vixens.

Among the remaining men, we should first consider the storytellers, Elon Womble as our Narrator and Maximilian Novick as geek master Chuck. Nguyen doesn’t specify how our Narrator should be attired, but he broadly suggests that she or he radiate a Lord of the Rings aura. Accordingly, Novick sports a garish green medieval outfit over long black boots, an implicit invite for us to straddle the real and fantasy worlds as the story unfolds.

Novick can roam more freely between teen nerdiness and master of the dark arts, a transition marked by donning a monkish cowl and deepening his voice. There’s also a mix of gawkiness, horniness, and bravado that Novick obviously relished.

As Orcus, the retiring Demon Overlord, Truman Grant gets to wear more majestic horns than those sported by Lilith (some history between them is hinted at). For old-school aficionados of The Wizard of Oz, Orcus might pleasantly echo the roaring veneer of the Cowardly Lion. Grant’s demon doesn’t suffer from self-image hangups, and he’s more of a careless, world-weary slacker than timid, having shrewdly traded Tillius’s soul for a badass TV/VCR combo.

Evangelicals and assorted homophobes despise She Kills Monsters, especially when it defiles their precious schools. Once again, such harmless and rollicking sacrilege is happening again in the QC. It’s particularly distressing for the haters to see Tillius and Orcus uniting with Agnes on her adventure. Both of them can tell the Ass-hat a thing or two about how to die.

Shakespeare, Airplanes, and Jazz in CP’s “Twelfth Night”

Review: Twelfth Night at the Parr Center

By Perry Tannenbaum

Shakespeare’s best comedies are bursting with multiple plots, and two of the most perfect – A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night – are the most dizzying and delightful. It is quite likely that the latter, later work was first performed on Twelfth Night of 1601 to celebrate the newborn century on January 5 (with a singing clown suggestively named Feste). Yet time, scholarship, and heavy-handed dramaturgy have tended to darken many modern-day productions.

That’s why the current Central Piedmont Theatre version at the Parr Center, adapted and directed by Elizabeth Sickerman, is so refreshing. Twelfth Night has at least four main plots: Viola’s separation and reunion with her twin brother Sebastian, Duke Orsino’s unrequited love for the widowed Countess Olivia (seconded by Sir Andrew Aguecheek), Viola’s crush on Orsino while disguised as his manservant, and the wicked prank concocted by Aguecheek, Sir Toby Belch, Feste, and Maria to send Olivia’s ambitious and party-pooping steward, Malvolio, to the madhouse.

Of these, the most dominant plot should be the Viola-Orsino mess, for it sprouts so many delicious complications. Acting as Caesario, Orsino’s servant, Viola is dispatched to to Countess Olivia’s manor to plead on behalf of the Duke – only to have the Countess fall in love with her. Olivia’s inclinations toward Viola/Caesario not only enflame Orsino’s jealousy, they also lead to an absurd duel with fellow coward Sir Andrew. Meanwhile, she encounters Sebastian’s close friend, Antonio, who puts all his money in Viola’s care, mistaking her for her twin. You can easily imagine what happens when Sir Andrew makes the same mistake.

Ultimately, the mistaken identities reach the giddy point where Olivia cannot recognize her own husband just hours after their marriage. Ah, a honeymoon to remember.

So to tip the balance toward empathizing with Malvolio, simply because he is incidentally berated as “a kind of puritan,” is rather perverse. Elsewhere, I’ve seen the steward outfitted with a Puritan’s hat. Far more stupidly, I’ve heard a theatre sage say Malvolio was modeled on Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, born in 1599. Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex (1485-1540), instrumental in the English Reformation, is a more feasible candidate. Sickerman not only discards such nonsense, she transports the action from ancient Illyria, at the heel of Italy’s boot, to a coastal town immersed in the Jazz Age.

Costume designer Emily McCurdy certainly goes with the Roaring 20’s flow. Orsino and Olivia could easily pass for the recently reprised Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan on Broadway, surrounded by flappers and jazzy gallants galore. The moving pieces and projections of Jennifer O’Kelly’s scenery, more evocative of summer than winter, have enough classic detailing for Viola to sit at the foot of an Ionian pillar when describing herself sitting like “Patience on a monument.”

Nor does the music veer from the vintage of Prohibition days. Montavious Blocker has choice cuts of Duke Ellington and Sidney Bechet in his soundtrack, and just a few bars of music arranger Matt Postle’s chart for “Come Away, Death,” transformed from a lover’s lament into a jivey jump tune, are enough to conclusively vanquish melancholy, injecting Feste’s song for the lovesick Orsino with catchy mischief. The debris downstage suggests an Amelia Earhart plane crash rather than Shakespeare’s original shipwreck, and Charles Lindbergh could have inspired Sebastian and Viola’s matching outfits. Except for the tacky slacks.

If you’ve seen Twelfth Night before, Sickerman cordially adds to the Bard’s dizzying layers of identity, cutting some expositional text and casting females in key roles. Not one of them is a Chickspeare alum. Saskia Lewis as Feste, Rhianon Chandler as Antonio, and Kameal Brown as the recklessly unknighted Dame Toby Belch are all QC newcomers to me. If only Aryana Mitchell, portraying Viola, had an identical twin sister to take on Sebastian!

We are centuries away from the Protestant Reformation or the English Restoration, although Sickerman seems to beach the sibs closer to the Pilgrims’ beloved Plymouth Rock than to the Adriatic coast. Such oceanic distancing frees Malvolio from a dungeon of scorn when Central Piedmont’s plotters and nobles plunk their preening steward into a humble barrel to punish his prudery.

He isn’t the clown among the comical group, but Sickerman allows Truman Grant as Malvolio to loosen up, so that his usual rigidity is now almost elegance, mockable now as uppity pretense. Another sign of Sickerman’s lighthearted touch: her pick for the incredulous Sebastian is Timothy Snyder, who is at least a foot taller than his “twin.”

The disparity was so great, that I didn’t catch on at first. Brown’s outfit as Dame Toby, more like Miss Marple than a Falstaffian drunkard, compounded my early confusion, making me feel like newbie to the comedy while I got oriented. Struggling to remember a single instance when the euthanized CPCC Summer Theatre ever presented such a challenging comedy, I stumbled upon another reason why this excellent production was so refreshing.

All the cast was youthful, like the summer college grads who swarmed to Charlotte during CP summers to launch their pro careers. Not one old-timer in the bunch!

As a result of coping with all the period, costume, and gender changes, my disorientation was dispelled at the same time that I was learning to trust the youngbloods performing at CP’s New Theater, which has thankfully replaced panoramic Pease Auditorium but lamentably failed to showcase nearly as much CP talent. The mental training wheels that I had doled out to all these student efforts quickly flew away.

But along with a lightened, more secular and decadent Malvolio, there was newfound pleasure in the other creatures onstage who no longer needed to orbit around the self-absorbed steward. The Malvolio miasma that I’d felt since my first encounter with Twelfth Night in a college Shakespeare seminar, taught by a professor victimized by the prevailing obsession with the “puritan,” finally evaporated.

Twelfth Night, or What You Will has always been an awesome comedy for me. Now it was fun. I’d barely appreciated the bounty of fascinating character sketches that the Bard serves up here.

Now Viola is the patient, softspoken eye of the storm, and Mitchell is keenly sensitive, alternately anguished and bemused by all the passion and folly that surround her. Mitchell’s discreet takes, shared with us, make her a sort of co-emcee with Feste, though Sickerman asks too many eyerolls from her. Fitz Fitzpatrick is only slightly over-the-top with the lovesick gushings of Orsino, chiming well with a lounging Duke or a mob boss. Yes, that sleek robe has a Godfather aura before we see Fitz in the Gatsby threads.

As Olivia, Arianna Zappley does not yield at all to Fitzpatrick in regal dopiness. The two are as perfect a matching pair as the twins, made for each other, yet both are insanely lucky to land one of the sibs. Rounding out the symmetry of the two couples as Sebastian is the disproportioned Snyder, who does manage to nearly equal the calm of his diminutive twin – even though the Illyrians mistake him for her over and over. Playing Sebastian’s closest friend, the wrongly arrested Antonio, Chandler helps the prisoner to emerge as a neat counterweight to Malvolio, who is rightfully chastised for his presumption, though the penalty is too harsh.

There’s a little more slapstick flavor to the motley crew who bedevil Malvolio – and a bit more spice. Evelyn Ovall as Olivia’s waiting-gentlewoman Marie, who forges her mistress’s handwriting in the billet-doux that entraps the detested steward, is destined to marry Brown as Dame Toby. I’d like to think Ellington and his orchestra would have consented to play at the wedding reception, but I’m not sure.

Dopiest of the conspirators and clearly the least self-aware is Salim Muhammad as Sir Andrew, usually exiting with an absurdly military goosestep. In his challenge to Caesario/Viola, Muhammad now dons boxing gloves instead grabbing a sword, magnifying his ineffectuality with his effeminate pawing as he briefly combats the well-matched Mitchell.

Lewis effortlessly steals nearly every scene she appears in as Feste, convincing me along the way that this clown was intended to upstage all others. Not only does Feste sing lyrically and wittily – compared to the other lovers who barely stammer their effusions – she proves to be a better actress than the leading lady, Viola. Visiting Malvolio at the mouth of a barrel he believes is dark hell, Feste gives bravura performances as Sir Topas, a parson supposedly sent to determine how mad this lunatic is, interspersed with imitations of a sincere jester. Lewis cackles and coos this cruel vaudeville as bewitchingly as she swings death, ranging further than anyone else.

Photos by Perry Tannenbaum