Choate! Prepare yourselves for an epic fantasy Dungeons and Dragon (D&D) adventure unlike anything you have experienced before. To tackle the monster of a play, the cast of She Kills Monsters by Mr. Qui Nguyen has been rehearsing and training in the art of stage combat. Packed with bugbear fights, demon battles, and lots and lots of swords, the show comes to the Paul Mellon Arts Center (PMAC) stage on February 15, 16, and 17.
The play’s director, Mr. Bari Robinson, handed Connor Zeitlin ’25, who plays Dungeon Master Chuck Biggs, the script after he made an announcement during School Meeting about the Dungeons and Dragons Club. “I read that script in a geometry class; I did not pay attention in that geometry class.”
She Kills Monsters follows Agnes Evans, a deemed “ordinary” soul who never quite understood her atypical little sister Tilly Evans. Oona Yaffe ’23, who plays in the title role, explains that, “If everyone’s looking at, you know, an explosion that’s going on over here, [Agnes is] looking at the weird-looking rock.”
While Agnes lives an average life filled with shopping, dating, and watching the latest TV shows, Tilly devotes her life to studying the dark arts — reanimating dead lizards and vanquishing pure evil. Candace Beverly ’25, who plays Tilly, explained, “She’s both this really, really, really strong person who’s just so confident and really knows how to carry herself and then this girl who’s really scared and not happy with where she is.” Tilly tragically dies in a car crash before Agnes got to know her, but when Agnes discovers a D&D module written by Tilly herself, her life is turned around by an unforgettable adventure filled with bloody battles, five-headed dragons, supermodel demon queens, and more.
Due to the heavy load of combat in this production, Mr. Robinson invited Ms. Rebecca Hirota, a professional fight choreographer, to coordinate action sequences in the play.
Ms. Hirota explained, “Knowing that most of the cast was new to fight choreography, we started on day one with technique so the cast could build their vocabulary.” Her overarching goal throughout the process was “to tell the story safely and in a way that looks great and makes the cast feel like the badasses that they are,” Ms. Hirota explained.
While the stage fighting adds an extra layer of intensity and animation to the story, it also poses its challenges. “It’s a lot of fighting. And then for every fight scene, there’s a more emotionally grounded scene sandwiched in there. So, it’s hard to keep up your emotional energy when you’re just expending all of your physical energy,” said Yaffe.
Zeitlin added that, unlike dance, the consequences of a mistake could be catastrophic in stage fighting. “Fighting is very different from dancing,” he said. “There’s a big chance we mess something up; it’s very hard to correct back into rhythm … you could get hurt. That’s a little scary.”
As the cast’s designated D&D encyclopedia, Zeitlin has been a devoted D&D player since he was little and even started a D&D program at his summer camp. “It helps tremendously for kids with social anxiety … and at the end of the summer, everyone’s like, holy crap, we just told an amazing story.”
Zeitlin is ecstatic to be showing the Choate community in She Kills Monsters how impactful playing Dungeons and Dragons can be to one’s life. “The show really explains just how powerful a D&D adventure can be,” he said. “Fantasy has such a huge potential to show us and teach us so much about our society and our world that nonfiction could never, ever be able to do.”
The cast of She Kills Monsters is armed and ready to take the Choate community on an unforgettable adventure of love, loss, and redemption. Zeitlin pridefully said, “The audience is in for a treat. I don’t know a better way to say this: they’re going to be blown away.”
