She Kills Monsters

She Kills Monsters (2011) is a dramatic comedy by playwright, director, and television and film writer Qui Nguyen. Nguyen is a co-founder of New York’s Vampire Cowboys Theater Company, an Obie Award–winning venue for “geek theater” that highlights productions inspired by science fiction, fantasy, and comic books. She Kills Monsters premiered at the Flea Theater in New York City on November 4, 2011, with Robert Ross Parker as the director. The play earned the Distinguished Play Award in 2013 from the American Alliance for Theater and Education and was nominated for the 2012 GLAAD (formerly the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) Media Award. In 2020, the New York Times featured the play in the article, “Queer Kids, Nerds and Sword Play: It’s the Hot School Play,” noting its nearly 800 performances from 2013 to 2021 and popularity on both university and high school campuses.

She Kills Monsters focuses on Agnes Evans, a young woman who loses her parents and younger sister in a car accident. Intrigued by the Dungeons and Dragons module that her late sister, Tilly, created, Agnes plays the game for the first time and discovers how little she knew her sister. Set in Ohio in 1995, the play shifts between the real and the imagined world, replete with stage combat, irreverent pop culture references, and interactions with Tilly’s ghost. Through Tilly’s narrative of adventure and heroism, Agnes copes with her grief and learns about her sister’s imaginative spirit and experiences as a lesbian youth who found support and compassion within her D&D community. The play has also been adapted into a “Young Adventurer’s Edition” for high school performances, and in response to 2020 COVID-19 stay-at-home measures, Nguyen created a “Virtual Realms” edition for online performances.

This guide references the revised 2016 edition of the original play published by Samuel French, Inc.

Plot Summary

The play opens with a prologue modeled after the opening of Peter Jackson’s film version of The Fellowship of the Ring. A hooded female narrator introduces the setting as Athens, Ohio, in 1995 and presents the main characters, Agnes Evans and Tilly Evans, as two sisters who are complete opposites. Tilly is a 16-year-old Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast who fantasizes about wielding magical powers and slashing evil villains. Her older sister, Agnes, is the epitome of ordinariness and has typical interests in boys, pop music, and mainstream television shows. On the night of her college graduation, Agnes wishes to be less ordinary, and her family dies in a tragic car accident.

The play resumes two years after the deaths of Agnes’s parents and sister, Tilly. Agnes is now in the process of moving out of her family home to live with her boyfriend, Miles. While packing away Tilly’s belongings, she discovers a notebook that contains a Dungeons and Dragons module that Tilly had privately written. Longing to find a connection with her sister, Agnes recruits a young clerk named Chuck from a local gaming store to teach her how to play. To Agnes’s surprise, Chuck tells her that Tilly was known as Tillius the Paladin and was one of the most popular and respected players of Dungeons and Dragons in town.

As the game’s Dungeon Master, Chuck narrates and directs the action in Tilly’s fantasy world of New Landia. Agnes encounters her sister’s character, Tillius (embodied by a specific actor onstage but understood to be role-played by Chuck within the action of the game). Agnes moves to hug Tilly, but her “sister” reminds her that the game is not therapy and that she needs to play correctly. Agnes meets the other members of Tilly’s party: Orcus the Demon, Lilith the Demon Queen, and Kaliope the Dark Elf. Agnes at first belittles the role-playing game and refuses to immerse herself in the magical world. However, when she learns that the party’s quest is to recover Tilly’s lost soul, she becomes more invested in the narrative and begins to level up in the game.

On their journey, Tilly’s party runs through a course of fantastical creatures and uses their weapons and magical spells to protect each other and violently slash their enemies to pieces. During their adventures, Agnes learns that Tilly and Lilith are lovers and that everyone in New Landia is gay. After a brutal encounter with two evil Succubi, Agnes discovers that the real Tilly was a target of anti-gay bullying at her school. Disappointed in herself for not knowing more about her sister’s private life, Agnes becomes defensive and chastises Tilly for not telling her about her experiences. Tilly retorts that Agnes never gave her any time or attention, and the truth of Tilly’s accusation stings Agnes and riddles her with guilt.

The play’s setting shifts back and forth between Tilly’s fantasy world of New Landia and the real world of Athens, Ohio, where Agnes works as an English teacher at Tilly’s high school. Agnes struggles to accept Tilly’s death and begins to confront people in real life who were characters in Tilly’s module. Desperate to find out more about her sister, Agnes inappropriately pressures a student named Lilly, Lilith’s real-life counterpart, to admit that she was Tilly’s girlfriend. When two cheerleaders enter Agnes’s classroom for a yearbook donation, she immediately recognizes them as the Succubi who bullied Tilly in the game, and so she destroys their book. Agnes begins to spend less time with her boyfriend, Miles, and starts talking to Tilly’s ghost in the real world.

In the play’s climax, Lilith dies after defending Tilly from an attack, and Agnes is inconsolable. Angry that no one can revive Lilith’s character and keep her sister from suffering her loss, Agnes quits the game. Drawing a parallel between the finality of Lilith’s death and the death of her sister, Agnes feels dejected that nothing can bring Tilly back to life. She blames herself for both neglecting Tilly in the past and indulging in delusions now by playing the game.

When Chuck visits Agnes to return Tilly’s module, he invites her to meet some of Tilly’s friends. Ronnie, the boy who played Orcus, and his sister Kelly, who played Kaliope, welcome Agnes and tell her how much they loved and miss Tilly. Agnes also talks to Lilly to apologize for her outburst and to deliver a letter that Tilly had left for her friend. Lilly tells Agnes that she and Tilly were close, and she regrets not telling her that she loved her. Agnes, recognizing that she is not alone in her feelings of loss and guilt, finds comfort in the people who shared Tilly’s sense of fun, adventure, and friendship. She returns to the game with a renewed understanding that her sister’s spirit lives on in the stories she told and in the people who love her.