Department of Theatre & Performance Studies presents “She Kills Monsters”

By Amanda Wansa Morgan

has all these big ol’ hand-painted eyeballs on the front and a moving mouth. It’s pretty fun. The dragon is the showstopper, though. It’s a big rod puppet that is above the puppeteers on long rods, and it has a moving mouth and extendable wings that flap, and there’s about six puppeteers on it, working all five of the heads and holding the puppet up in the air, and a person back on the tail.” The dragon puppet used in the show also featured lighting elements designed and rigged by student lighting designer Ben Holmes, a Senior in the Design/Tech Concentration.

Kennesaw State University Department of Theatre and Performance Studies presented Qui Nguyen’s She Kills Monsters October 11-16, 2022. Between the puppetry, the stage combat, and the world of Dungeons and Dragons, up close and personal in The Onyx Theater, She Kills Monsters brought a good deal of quirky fun to campus.

characters and plots within a group. Participants are plunged into a multi-layered fantastical world filled with goblins, wizards and more, and players become a central character in their own story. She Kills Monsters is a stage play that explores the world of D&D from an unusual and nuanced perspective. It centers on Agnes, a bereft sister willing to step outside her comfort zone.

Back in October, puppet designer Cedwan Hook, student actor India Smith, and Davis joined “City Lights” senior producer Kim Drobes to talk more about their play’s nimble dance between fantasy and realism.

around, better.”

Davis added, “She goes to the local Dungeon Master, a guy named Chuck who is a weirdo, and they play the game. And the production really kind of splits in half. Half of the play is in the real world, where she’s dealing with her friends and her boyfriend, but the other half is in Dungeons & Dragons world, and there are monsters and sword fights, and it’s big and loud and crazy… Ultimately, she gets more of an understanding of who her sister really was.”

India Smith (Tilly), a Junior in the Acting Concentration, shared some thoughts on her character. “When you’re a 15-year-old girl trying to figure out your life, and trying to figure out who you exactly want to be and your identity, you don’t understand that you’re going to change your identity forty different times before you’re actually gone,” said Smith. “When you have an outlet where you can go somewhere and be anybody you want to be, create anything – I really respect Tilly for going out and doing that. I think [Tilly’s D&D character] ‘Tillius’ embodies that strength and that fearlessness that Tilly doesn’t have, or couldn’t acquire, while she was alive. Tillius is just fearless, and Tillius really shows how fearless Tilly is.”

Directed by Dr. Jim Davis, Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies, the work was an exciting romp into the world of Dungeons and Dragons, featuring unique puppets built by Kennesaw State students, faculty, and guest artists.

For the unfamiliar, Dungeons & Dragons, also known as D&D, is a highly successful game in which players can create deeply intricate

“At the beginning of the play, her family dies tragically in a car accident, and so she really has to come to grips with that and is dealing with her grief and her relationship with her family, in particular her little sister, Tilly. They always had kind of a tough relationship; whereas Agnes was kind of mainstream and normal, Tilly was a weirdo and a geek,” said Davis. “Agnes comes across a Dungeons & Dragons module Tilly had created – a Dungeons & Dragons map, an adventure – and she wants to play it so she can

The creative team, working with other theatre students and Hooks built an array of outstanding puppets to bring out the fantastic elements of the show. “We’ve got a fiveheaded dragon, a Beholder that has one great big eye and a bunch of eyestalks attached to them, and a number of other monsters that are just amazing,” said Hooks.

“We’ve gotten really ambitious with our design and fabrication of, for instance, the Beholder… He’s about eight feet tall and really wide, in a big wearable suit that

She Kills Monsters featured a cast of nineteen KSU students and – in addition to the intriguing puppet work –allowed students to hone their skills of stage combat with professional fight choreographer and part-time faculty member Amelia Fischer. Fischer staged numerous fights in the show, some of which featured hand-to-hand combat and some of which utilized stage weaponry. Students involved in the show benefited from learning stage combat skills and implementing them in the show with an intricate “fight call” every night to practice and ensure safety. •