On the stage of the UO Robinson Theatre, two evil cheerleaders rip off a man’s arms. He runs around screaming before the cheerleaders rip out his trachea and cast him offstage. Other actors rush in with weapons of their own. An ax and a mace come swinging down. Metal clashes, swords and shields collide until only one team still stands. Then they run it again.
“You’re gonna be out here on opening night, and you’re gonna have all this jazz in your body,” fight choreographer Bill Hulings says to the actors from the house. “Keep it in control.”
It’s 3:30 now on Oct. 23, a Sunday afternoon. The fight choreography rehearsal began at noon, and it doesn’t stop till 4. The cast and crew have been rehearsing Sunday through Thursday, week after week, since the second week of the term. At this point, they have 12 days until the show opens, 12 days to master their choreography, their blocking and their lines, 12 days to finish the costumes, props, puppets, sounds and sets, 12 days to come together and bring to perfection one of the most complex plays the University Theatre has ever performed.
“This is a big show, and we have had a really, really short rehearsal schedule for it,” stage manager Hannah Lake said.
“She Kills Monsters,” directed by Michael Majek Najjar, kicks off the University Theatre’s season on Nov. 4. The show follows Agnes Evans, a young Ohioan who loses her estranged sister, Tilly, in a car crash, prompting her to try out Tilly’s favorite pastime — the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.
“She Kills Monsters” is theatrically and technically demanding, but it’s a welcome challenge for the cast and crew who have long loved it for everything it offers — its comedy, its drama, its spectacle, its portrayal of strong women, and its affirming and complex exploration of queer identity.
Typically, theatre arts faculty select the plays they want to put on, according to Najjar. But “She Kills Monsters” was different. A group of graduate students proposed it: Piper Lambert-Vail, the show’s costume designer; John Gibson, the show’s technical director; and Sam Fox, costume technician.
The group was “very adamant” about doing the show because of their love for it, Lambert-Vail said. Lambert-Vail has always read “She Kills Monsters” as a play for everyone because of the inclusivity of D&D.
“D&D is one of the most inclusive communities you can be a part of,” Lambert-Vail said. “Everyone is accepted regardless of gender, sexuality, race, disability, ability — it’s something that doesn’t matter because you can become a new person entirely. And you’re loved for that person just as much as you’re loved for who you are in real life.”
Aero Ankle, who plays Agnes, has also been a longtime fan of “She Kills Monsters.” It appealed to her because she had struggled to find plays which don’t focus on their female protagonists’ romantic relationships. There are fewer queer relationships in popular media, and often those queer relationships are reduced to suffering. However, everyone is presumed gay in Tilly’s D&D campaign setting of New Landia, making queerness feel “normalized,” Ankle said.
“As a queer kid in high school who loved D&D and hanging out and doing stuff with my friends who are all mostly queer,” Ankle said, “it was like, ‘Oh my god, this is us.’”
“She Kills Monsters” has become a popular play among high schools and universities around the country since its release in 2011. It was among the top licensed plays in the collegiate market for 2021 at Concord Theatricals, Abbie Van Nostrand, senior vice president of client relations & community, wrote over email.
Najjar also recognized the opportunity to support new theatrical works from marginalized voices. As an Arab American, that’s part of his mission, he said.
“When we do plays like this, playwrights get paid,” Najjar said. “When we don’t do plays like this, they don’t get paid. So it’s incumbent upon us to do these plays to get working, living American playwrights produced and paid for their work.”
In April, he directed “God Said This,” written by Japanese American playwright Leah Nanako Winkler. “She Kills Monsters” was written by Qui Nguyen, an American writer born to Vietnamese immigrants.
“Everyone looked around the table and asked, ‘Who’s going to direct it?’” Najjar recalled when it came to choosing “She Kills Monsters” as the play. “And I said, ‘I’d love to.’”
For Najjar, the play works on several levels. It’s a rich play with wonderful action sequences and spectacle — “a theatrical feast,” he said — but regardless of one’s interest in D&D, the play stands as a moving story about love, loss and redemption.
“It’s a story about trying to connect with people we’ve lost in our lives,” Najjar said. “And it’s a story about how we can overcome our grief when we lose people we love. For me, that’s my way into this play.”
The play is a dream role for Ankle, albeit a challenging one. As Agnes, she appears in every scene but one. She has to face the audience alone in an emotional monologue in the show’s final act.
“The very, very end is probably one of my favorite parts because I always want to cry when we do it,” Ankle said.
Like Ankle, Faith Clarke, who plays Tilly, must also perform fight choreography as well as hit difficult emotional scenes.
“I find more action scenes easier to do,” Clarke said, “whereas the ones where it’s dealing with heavier stuff — it feels harder to get into that space when you’re on stage.”
The show also contains lots of comedy. Having his arms ripped off is a highlight for Jimmy Ravitch, who plays Steve, the D&D campaign’s mage. (In another scene, Ethan Kemper, who plays Agnes’ boyfriend Miles, gets his heart ripped out.)
For Aidan Kent, who plays Dungeon Master Chuck Biggs, it’s a dream role for him “to be able to goof around, be the comedic relief in an already funny show.” Kent, a UO sophomore, played the same role when he was a sophomore at Lincoln High School in Portland. In 2019, the cast performed the show as part of the Oregon Thespians State Festival in Salem.
Of course, “She Kills Monsters” demands a lot from its crew too. The huge amount of tech aspects is part of why Lake was excited to join. As stage manager, Lake is responsible for calling the show’s cues, each light, sound, projection and fly cue.
The show will feature original music by Story Arney. It will include videos recorded by Chase Foster-Adams and projected by Quinn Connell onto the sets by scenic designer Julianne Bodner. Foster-Adams will also mic and modulate the voices for various monsters — bugbears, kobolds, trolls and the mind flayer — and he will curate and record sounds for the dragon Tiamat. Leo Young will compile the sound cue library, including sounds to supplement the fight scenes. The sound designers are working with faculty technical director Bradley Branam. Arney, Foster-Adams, Connell, Bodner and Young are all undergraduate students; a lot of key roles in the show are fulfilled by undergrads, according to faculty advisor Jerry Hooker.
The show’s costumes are numerous and fantastic. Lambert-Vail read the play 15 times, they said, in order to get a mental image of each character before beginning their designs over the summer. Most of the players have dual roles; they must exist in both the mundane reality of Athens, Ohio, and the fantasy realm of New Landia. Lambert-Vail did research to make sure the armor would work in combat and also look aesthetically beautiful.
“One of the bigger challenges was getting the female characters to feel comfortable in their costumes while also portraying heroic femininity because it’s so overly sexualized,” Lambert-Vail said.
The costume shop is also home to many of the show’s monsters. There are six actors who don the monster masks, which are a combination of things pulled from storage, bought from Amazon or fabricated by students in the costume shop, according to Jeanette deJong. A UO professor, deJong is in charge of the monsters, working closely with Lambert-Vail to bring the characters into focus.
Avery White, a senior history major, stars as one of the monsters. It can be hard to see in the bugbear mask, and it’s stuffy in there, she said, but it’s fun.
“It feels really good to let loose a little bit,” White said, “especially when they’re like, ‘Make monsters noises; make sounds.’ And when you just completely go for it, and you can hear everybody in the audience go crazy for it — it just made me feel really good.”
There’s one particularly long fight scene in the show which is divided into six phrases. The cast and crew call it the “monster montage.”
The monster actors will also puppeteer the show’s bosses. There’s the beholder, a large many-eyed orb monster, and the final boss Tiamat, a five-headed dragon goddess. Alex Homer, a theatre arts major, built Tiamat’s heads out of upholstery foam. They first created a small model for the dragon head in clay, from which they made a pattern of 16 pieces for each head.
“There’s one little dragon that already exists, and now we just have to make its giant cousin,” Homer said.
In addition to the fight scenes, there’s a cheer-off choreographed by members of the UO Cheerleading team — Hallie Esau, Sara Guidera, Roxy Lee and Morgan Nguyen — who volunteered their time, Najjar said. The evil succubi cheerleaders, played by Sarah Lee and Amelia Takahashi, perform deadly high kicks, cartwheels and aerials throughout the show. Najjar loves the idea of cross-collaboration, he said.
On Monday, Oct. 24, the cast came in to rehearse the cheer choreography. It was wet and dark out as it approached 8 o’clock. Then they began a stumble-through of the show until 10. The actors aren’t in costume yet, and the sets aren’t complete — you can see Tiamat’s skeleton, headless, behind the actors on the stage — but the cast is dancing, doing cartwheels and pyramids to “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” by C+C Music Factory.
“All the pieces come little by little,” Najjar said, but soon, they will all come together.
“She Kills Monsters” plays Nov. 4, 5, 11, 12, 18 and 19 at 7:30 p.m. with a Sunday matinee Nov. 13 at 2. Tickets are available for advance purchase through the UO Ticket Office. Tickets are free for students with UO ID at the Miller Theatre Box Office, which opens 1 hour prior to curtain.
“It has D&D and lesbians,” Clarke said. “Come see the show.”
Theatre arts major Chase Foster-Adams paints a mask for an umber hulk, an insect-like monster with large mandibles and claws, in the costume shop. The mask’s eyes are fitted with coils of LEDs so they light up purple. Foster-Adams is also responsible for pre-recording sounds and video to be played during the show. “I have been wanting to do this show since I heard that it existed,” Foster-Adams said. “I’m really into Dungeons & Dragons. I DM a couple groups.”
