You enter the playhouse of Theatre Knoxville Downtown, and encounter a dimly lit stage. As you take your seat, the house lights fade, and you must roll a stealth check to silence your phone and hold in that irritating sneeze as the action begins. Take a trip back to the mid 90s and reminisce on delicious dorkery with Theatre Knoxville Downtown’s latest production. Director Courtney Woolard presents a cheesy, campy, 90s pop culture fueled production of Qui Nguyen’s She Kills Monsters that is sure to delight nerds, geeks, and everyone in between.
She Kills Monsters is the story of Agnes Evans (Raine Palmer), a boring, average, 24-year old English teacher living a boring, average life. Her entire family has died in a tragic car accident, and in cleaning out her much younger sister Tilly’s (Sienna Wood) things, discovers a Dungeons and Dragons campaign that Tilly had written. In an effort to learn more about her late sister, Agnes decides to play the campaign and ends up learning a bit about herself along the way.
TKD’s set design team, led by Seth Reilly, has really taken things up a notch after adding an extra 4 feet of frontage to their stage. I appreciate the creative design with this production, featuring a large hexagonal cutout at center stage resembling the classic D20 die used in Dungeons and Dragons campaigns where actors can enter and exit each scene. Combined with the funky paint job reminiscent of arcades, video rental stores, and bowling alleys of days gone bye, it’s a minimalistic set that works well with the shifts between the real world settings of Athens, Ohio, and the imagined, in-game scenes of New Landia. Two white curtains, also center stage, were lowered and lifted to facilitate shadow play during certain scenes, and I really enjoyed these segments; they worked well with the play’s use of narration. Lighting changes by Zoe Jurgensen help to facilitate these shifts between the game world and the play world.
She Kills Monsters has a fairly large cast list, so I’ll stick to the most notable performances. Palmer as Agnes is perhaps the strongest performance of the bunch, and to no surprise; she always aces her roles (pun intended). Palmer captures Agnes’s awkward uncomfortability in the early portions of the campaign and develops a heartwarming self-confidence in the later scenes. Wood’s performance as Tilly was also strong, but she steamrolls through her lines and is a tad hard to hear on occasion, especially when she has to speak over music. She oozes confidence no doubt, but she’s drowned out by the music. I noticed this particularly in the scene where Tilly introduces the rest of her campaign’s party, which is a big moment of exposition where hearing every word really matters. I think a small bit of audio adjustment could correct this.
Casey Cain as Chuck was funny and endearing, and he’s got that 90s video store clerk vibe down pat. Chuck is definitely one of his better roles with TKD. Emma Potter and Helena Jordan as Lilith/Lily and Kaliope/Kelly, respectively, were also a delight on stage, but their performances also suffered from the steamrolling of line delivery; everything went so fast that I didn’t get a good grasp of their in-game characterization, but their performances as Tilly’s real life friends Lily and Kelly were better done, perhaps because the play slowed down a bit at those points. Matthew Gainey as Orcus was nice comic relief, and I enjoyed his quick-witted and well-executed performance. And while Eric Walker as Steve made just a few short appearances, I can’t NOT mention his ridiculousness; he’s pure comedy cannon-fodder, showing up merely to be brutally slain, torn limb from limb, or devoured by a gelatinous blob. Long live Steve!
As this play is action-packed, there’s quite a bit of stage combat involved, with several actors engaged in swordfighting simultaneously. I imagine it’s quite a feat for fight choreographer JP Schuffman to manage all that sword-slinging, but I felt the combat to be a bit stilted and cautious. The actors seemed to be playing it rather safe, and I would have appreciated a more energetic, engaged, and exaggerated style. But as a non-academic and all-volunteer group, I think they did their best with the stage combat.
She Kills Monsters runs until June 28th with showings on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 7:30pm and matinees on Sundays at 3pm. Tickets are available at TKD’s box office, located at 800 S. Central Street, or online at https://theatreknoxville.com/she-kills-monsters/.
