She Kills Monsters
Company One at the Boston Center for the Arts is staging She Kills Monsters, a nifty play by Qui Nguyen.
Agnes Evans (Paige Clark Perkinson) is a young but dull Ohio school teacher. Her parents and her geeky teenage sister Tilly (Jordan Clark – the actresses are sisters) died in a car crash. Cleaning out Tilly’s room, she comes across an obscure module that has something to do with D&D. She asks experts for help: what is this stuff? What does she want to do with it? Play it! And so Agnes the Ass-Hatted goes adventuring in her dead sister’s psychic wilderness.
This is clever: leaving an apologia in the form of a D&D adventure is crazy, but it’s just the sort of thing Tilly would do. The adventure leaves us plenty of room to play with identity (Tilly becomes Tillius the Paladin who does battle with, among other things, a pack of cheerleader succubi) alongside the redoubtable axe-wielding tank Lillith and the sveltely dangerous dark elf Kaliope. “Why don’t any of you know how to dress yourselves?” Agnes complains constantly about their improbable armor. She learns the answer, and much more.