The American stage is a space in which artists and audiences alike are searching for and exploring their identities. Theatre creates a space and a conduit for that exploration, a driving force for artists and audience members as they experience the many wonderful stories in the theatre. Basically, theatre artists— like everyone else— are constantly trying to find themselves and as our understanding of the world (internal and external) shifts, so do we. This is where we encounter She Kills Monsters by Qui Nguyen.
This play finds Agnes trying to connect to her dead sister Tilly through a Dungeons & Dragons module that Tilly created. As Agnes encounters Tilly’s world through the game it challenges her understanding of her sister. This challenge is woven beautifully through both the DNA of the play and through D&D as a game. Through Dungeons and Dragons, players (both in the world of the play and in our “real” world) can build community with each other and challenge and shift their identities.
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As society's understanding of identity shifts, I cannot help but ponder what D&D, theatre, and She Kills Monsters can offer us in our quest for understanding identity and selfhood. This search is one that every human explores and has shifted in the last 30 years through societal understandings of sexuality and gender exploration. She Kills Monsters, set in the 1990s, posits that this search–no matter the age of the person or decade they live in–requires a language to express itself to both the searcher and those around them. This is the tension and space that Agnes and Tilly find themselves caught in. The emotional landscape of She Kills Monsters is the crossfire of seeking and building understanding that must be navigated as we, and those we care about, explore and express who we are. The world that Tilly lived in vs. the world that she created shifts Agnes’s understanding of both herself and her family. Just as Tilly used D&D to express herself, many players of the game use it to explore themselves too.
D&D offers a low-risk space for people to explore who they are, what they like (i.e. who they like), and what type of person they want to be without the same consequences faced in the real world. It allows all who play freedom often barred from anyone who looks, feels, or loves differently than the hegemonic group around them. This freedom offers a sense of utopia free from the dominant oppressors that bar us from ourselves. This landscape is what makes the D&D battlefield the perfect place to encounter truths about oneself. These truths are what we seek to advocate for in the theatre, together we create a space where we face fire-breathing dragons.
This is the beauty contained in the play She Kills Monsters. The play is not caught in a utopia in which nothing happens but instead presents characters searching for and exploring their identity, caught in between a world that can’t be fully understood and a world that does not fully understand. This is the space in which we encounter this play today as we laugh, love, and grieve with the characters. Through their search for their selfhood, we can also explore ourselves and our identity. The dragons in our world are ever present. Through this play, and this amazing game that the characters play, we are able to find a common tongue, form a community, and slay our dragons, together.
