Pittsburgh in the Round: I was pretty stoked to get to see She Kills Monsters at Pitt last week, not because I’m into Dungeons & Dragons (never played it myself), but because I’m a huge geek and was excited at the prospect of bringing gaming and theater together. I figured it could either be very entertaining or pretty awful. I’m happy to report that Pitt went the route of very entertaining.
4 comments:
I LOVE this show! This review touches on many aspects of the show, but doesn't mention scenic design really. She Kills Monsters was the last show I ever worked on in high school. Having gotten into CMU and worked out all the details, I took the risk of trying out scenic design. I see a lot of the inspiration I had from playing DnD in high school in Pitt's design as well. It looks like Pitt's set takes a lot of inspiration from the die used to play DnD. The photo at the beginning of this article looks like it comes from the very start of the show when the part is being introduced. I see lines in the set behind them which, to me, resemble marble. Fake marble is a really common paint treatment for d20s, and the specific turquoise color used is very popular. DnD also, obviously, takes place often in castles and dungeons from classic medieval times. The art work from DnD guides included photos which usually use brick and marble textures. From the photos later on in the article, it seems that the set may be projected onto, and the lines come to look more like veins. I also see a grid on the floor, probably a reference to the grid paper and place mats drawn on by Dungeon Masters to create a physical understanding of the world for the players.
It seems as if every high school and university in the world has decided to do She Kills recently, and in my opinion that's not a bad thing. My high school did it as our spring play my senior year, and not only was it a blast to design, but it also had a lot of relevance to teenagers and life in general. The way the playwright uses DnD to tell the story of grief and what someone goes through is easily related to by teenagers, and often helps them to grasp what might be going on around them. Almost everyone knows someone who has lost someone close to them, and they often don't really know what to do about it, or what emotions that person might be feeling. Having personally lost someone fairly recently to our production of She Kills, the show resonated very strongly with me, and I was able to see my peers understand the emotions of Agnes as the performance went on. That, as well as the queer representation and bullying makes the show extremely relevant to high school and university theaters, so I'm actually happy that this relatively unknown show has taken a spot in the student theater repertoire, because it definitely deserves a place.
“and there was a five-headed dragon on stage, so that’s basically as cool as it gets, right?” Yep. Now I regret missing this show. Story telling takes on different mediums, whether it’s through a book, a play, a musical, or even an D&D game. Using one form of story telling to highlight another form has always been an interesting concept to me. A large part of game design is how to help immerse your players in the story, even in board games. A really great boardgame has a story that is wrapped in the rules in a way that part of the fun of playing is being able to be part of how that story progresses, whether as a doctor trying to stop a pandemic, or a local sheriff trying to find the killer shark, or a clairvoyant traveler looking to solve the mystery of a haunted mansion (Pandemic, Shark Attack, and Mysterium, respectively). D&D is all about flexing story telling abilities and bonding over a shared ability to change the story—and the thrill of a die roll bringing your best laid plans to hit the troll crashing down around your ears as you instead gently stroke the troll’s cheek, thereby seducing him. Seeing that kind of story telling on stage to tell a larger story is a great way to “play within a play” but in a way that the audience might not be as familiar with, and one they may decide to go explore in depth at home.
I saw this production on the opening night. It was interesting and adorable. Except that it was home coming day for them and the university shoot out fireworks from the same building. So no one in the theater could hear any lines in the last thirty minutes. Maybe next year, they should move their opening night show by 30 minutes. Otherwise, I agree with this review in almost entirety. And for the record, the dragon was the best part of the production. There was much fog, five heads of the dragon with glaring red eyes were flying in the air on sticks and Agnes killed the heads one by one in quite charming battle. And Chuck played by Dennis Sen was indeed the most adorable character in the show. Except that the props master told him to cut down on snacking on stage later, so I don’t know anymore. I believe this production will be remounted in August Wilson Center next year with the same cast and same set, in case anyone wants to check out the dragon.
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