She Kills Monsters

The play begins with a cloaked female narrator, described in the stage direction as being modeled after Cate Blanchett’s film role in The Lord of the Rings. The narrator announces the setting as Athens, Ohio, in 1995, a time before the popularity of social media and online role-playing games like World of Warcraft. The unnamed narrator introduces 16-year-old Tilly Evans, one of the rare females who participates in the male-dominated role-playing game of Dungeons and Dragons. Tilly emerges onstage and performs a live fight sequence and vanquishes some monsters.

The narrator then introduces Tilly’s older sister, Agnes. In a reenactment performed with shadow puppets, the narrator describes Agnes’s typical teenage interests in boys, pop music, and television as a direct contrast to the magical worlds and evil villains of Tilly’s imagination. An embodiment of everything that is “average,” Agnes doesn’t understand her sister’s hobbies, and the two sisters share little in common. On the night of her college graduation, Agnes wishes that her life were less boring, and the shadow puppets re-enact the car accident that took the lives of Tilly and her parents. The tree that the car crashes into transforms into a dragon and whisks the vehicle away into the sky.