Review: SHE KILLS MONSTERS at Mary Moody Northen Theatre

Sometimes the best way to understand someone we love is to enter their world, even when that world happens to contain homicidal fairies, demon queens, gelatinous cubes, a five-headed dragon, and some realities we might not be ready to face. Qui Nguyen’s SHE KILLS MONSTERS begins with grief but, using game play and imaginative journey, refuses to stay quietly inside it. Instead, Nguyen challenges us to pick up a sword, roll the dice, turn up the 1990s music, and go looking for answers along with his richly developed characters.

Set in 1995, SHE KILLS MONSTERS follows Agnes Evans after the death of her teenage sister, Tilly. Agnes discovers a Dungeons & Dragons module Tilly created and, hoping to learn more about the sister she barely knew, begins playing the game herself. Soon Agnes is traveling through Tilly’s fantasy world alongside an assortment of warriors, monsters, fairies, and one particularly entertaining demon. Beneath all the swordplay and geek-culture humor, however, Nguyen has written a surprisingly tender story about grief, identity, acceptance, and the painful discovery that the people closest to us sometimes have entire worlds we never bothered to see.

Mary Moody Northen Theatre at St. Edward’s University is an ideal playground for this particular adventure. The theatre-in-the-round configuration puts the audience on every side of the action, leaving director Marcus McQuirter and his creative team with nowhere to hide as well as nearly everywhere to play. The result is an excellent production: funny without losing its emotional center, deliberately campy without becoming silly for silliness’ sake, and polished enough that its complicated theatrical machinery rarely calls attention to itself. And that polish begins with McQuirter’s outstanding cast. 

Victoria Turner gives an exceptional performance as Agnes, particularly in the gradual development of the character. Beginning as the comparatively ordinary sister who left home, built a life, and never really understood what mattered to Tilly, Turner makes the emotional distance Agnes travels entirely believable. She is lively and tremendously watchable in the comedy and fantasy sequences, but there is considerable flexibility in her performance as curiosity gives way to discovery, discomfort, anger, grief, and finally a deeper understanding of her sister. Turner never forces those transitions, which makes Agnes’ journey all the more affecting.

As Tilly, Harper Schreiner-Brown is equally compelling. She gives us a teenager who can be confident and heroic within the world she has created while still carrying all the uncertainty of a young person trying to understand her identity and find a place where she belongs. Schreiner-Brown avoids turning Tilly into either a tragic memory or an idealized lost sister. She feels like a teenager: complicated, funny, occasionally prickly, vulnerable, imaginative, and still becoming herself. That makes Agnes’ growing recognition of how much she did not know about Tilly particularly poignant.

Nomar De La Torre is terrific as Chuck, Agnes’ guide into Tilly’s Dungeons & Dragons campaign. De La Torre gives the character an easy, gently charismatic quality that makes Chuck immediately likable. He is clever and funny without pushing for laughs, and his enthusiasm for the game feels genuine rather than caricatured. The wonderful comic-book rack surrounding his introduction helps establish the period and the character, but De La Torre quickly makes Chuck much more than a collection of 1990s geek references. He becomes our guide as much as Agnes’, helping make the rules of this unfamiliar world understandable without slowing down the adventure.

Tilly’s adventuring party is rounded out beautifully by Camilla Escobar as Kalliope/Kelly, Chloe Nichols as Lilith/Lilly, and Aldo Hernandez Huerta as Orcus/Ronnie. Escobar brings a quieter strength to Kalliope that balances some of the larger personalities around her. Nichols is especially effective as Lilith, and the eventual connection between fantasy and reality gives her performance an emotional weight that helps us understand something important about Tilly: that through this game, she created a place where other people could become stronger versions of themselves. Huerta nearly walks away with every scene Orcus enters. His hilarious combination of false bravado and tentative confidence is enormously appealing, and he tosses out the play’s many 1990s cultural references with wonderful ease. The character’s excellent mask completes the effect, but Huerta’s comic timing makes Orcus memorable.

Jack Young as Miles has the difficult job of playing perhaps the most deliberately ordinary person in a story populated by warriors, demons, and monsters. His performance holds his own within this very strong company and lands several genuinely funny moments. Farrah the Faerie played by Silvana Rivera is one of the production’s most delightful surprises, in no small part because everything about the character contradicts what we might expect from something called a “faerie.” Her delivery is wonderfully incongruous with her appearance, and the two performers manipulating her around the playing space make the joke even better. Even her demise gets a perfectly ridiculous visual punctuation as curled ribbon tumbles onto the stage. Jackson Childs, meanwhile, turns Steve into one of the evening’s running comic triumphs. His repeated appearances earn increasingly enthusiastic audience responses, and by the final payoff after the curtain call, Steve has become the would-be hero we did not know we needed and that we’ve always wanted to be.

Guest artist Amber Quick performs the dual roles of Narrator and Vera, and the distinction she creates between them is remarkable. Her Narrator possesses an almost otherworldly quality appropriate to someone ushering us into an invented realm, while Vera is gloriously grounded: earthy, recognizable, and firmly planted in the real world. Even knowing both characters are played by Quick, it is easy to momentarily forget it. Quick is a familiar presence on Austin stages and has received both Austin Critics Table recognition, a BroadwayWorld Austin Award, a B. Iden Payne Award, and Central Texas Excellence in Theatre Award for previous performances. Here, her experience is evident not through showiness but through specificity: two roles, two physical and vocal worlds, and two completely different people.

Ava Baker as Evil Gabbi and Kaitlyn A. Moore as Evil Tina are astonishingly believable as the particular variety of teenage antagonists who can destroy someone with little more than a look and a few carefully chosen words. Baker and Moore understand that the funniest version of these characters is also the most recognizable. Their exaggerated fantasy manifestations may be monsters, but the pettiness, cruelty, and clique-ish behavior underneath them are grounded enough to remind us that some of Tilly’s most frightening monsters did not originate in a game.

The puppetry is among the production’s greatest pleasures. Jackson Childs, Jake McDonald, Izzy O’Brien, and Silvana Rivera perform demanding work with athleticism, grace, precision, and an admirable willingness to disappear into the creatures they animate. Kiryat Jearim Castillo’s excellent properties and puppet design gives them plenty to work with: shadow puppetry, handheld creatures, larger constructions, and a parade of theatrical monsters perfectly suited to the intentionally homemade-meets-epic quality of Tilly’s universe. The puppeteers give those creations weight, personality, and purpose. They are not merely moving scenery; they are performers integral to the success of the fantasy.

McQuirter’s direction is one of the primary reasons all of this holds together. He has assembled an exceptionally well-matched cast and understands the tonal balancing act Nguyen’s script requires. The production can be broad, campy, and ridiculous one moment and genuinely moving the next without either side undermining the other. McQuirter is Chair and Professor of Drama at Austin Community College, where he teaches acting and voice, and holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. His Central Texas directing credits are considerable, and that experience shows here, particularly in the confidence with which he lets the play be both enormously fun and emotionally sincere. The moments that tug at the audience are allowed to arrive naturally rather than being underlined, and the audience on opening night clearly traveled that journey with the cast.

Sound designer Johann Solo provides one of the evening’s standout production elements. His design is packed with 1990s music, atmospheric textures, and hard-driving accompaniment for the fight sequences, yet it never overwhelms the actors or calls unnecessary attention to itself. Instead, it continually enlarges the world around them. Solo, a widely recognized sound designer, musician, and artist in Austin and in SHE KILLS MONSTERS, his work demonstrates just how transformative sound design can be: the music and effects do not simply accompany the production; they help establish its period, propel its battles, distinguish its worlds, and magnificently elevate the storytelling.

The rest of the design team creates a remarkably cohesive playground. Theada Haining’s scenic design makes excellent use of the unusual demands of theatre in the round, creating five principal playing areas: the central floor and four elevated corner spaces, while stairs, entrances, and exits become additional territory as needed. A large map spread across the center at one point allows audiences on every side to follow the adventurers’ journey, an elegant solution to both storytelling and sightline challenges. 

Susan Branch Towne’s costumes establish a clear contrast between the ordinary characters and their fantasy counterparts, with looks that are colorful and imaginative without overwhelming these young warriors. Conor Tompkins’ lighting is particularly effective in delineating the numerous playing spaces and supporting the puppet and special-effects sequences. Andrew Heinrich’s fight choreography gives the battles energy and humor while remaining clear within the unusual staging configuration, and Wendy Sanders’ hair and makeup design completes the visual transformation between everyday Ohio and Tilly’s fantasy world. Vocal coach Sheila Gordon contributes to a production that asks its performers to sustain a considerable amount of heightened and physically demanding vocal work.

The period details are also a joy. The oversized television, game cartridges, comic books, Mötley Crüe and *Legend* imagery, Chuck Taylors, Alice in Chains shirt, and dozens of smaller touches establish 1995 without turning the production into a museum of nostalgia. They also remind us that Tilly’s fantasy world existed before online gaming communities and social media offered young people countless ways of finding others like themselves. Here, pencils, paper, dice, imagination, and a group gathered around a table become the tools for creating another world.

Keeping that world running is no small undertaking. Production Stage Manager Brennah Crowley-Galvin deserves particular commendation for managing an extraordinary number of moving parts with apparent ease. Assistant directors Logan Carlson and Jake McDonald, assistant stage managers Davian Chavez, Jamie Cross, and Aiden McGillicuddy, and fight captain Jake McDonald contribute to a production in which performers, puppets, combat, lighting, sound, scenery, and multiple entrances from virtually every direction must intersect with precision. The impressive thing is how rarely the audience is invited to think about that complexity. The machinery disappears, leaving the story.

And ultimately, that story is why all the monsters matter. SHE KILLS MONSTERS is great fun for anyone who loves Dungeons & Dragons, fantasy gaming, 1990s nostalgia, stage combat, puppetry, or simply watching actors enthusiastically battle impossible creatures. But Nguyen's play gradually reveals that the game is really a means of knowing another person. Agnes cannot change the years when she failed to understand Tilly, nor can she recover the conversations they never had. What she can do is enter the world her sister left behind and listen. Late in the play comes the aching hope that perhaps, through telling the story, “my soul gets a chance to breathe again.” In this production, that sentiment feels earned.

Mary Moody Northen Theatre’s SHE KILLS MONSTERS is highly recommended. McQuirter’s assured direction, a remarkably strong acting ensemble, inventive puppetry, exciting combat, and a collective of designers working at a consistently high level create a production with considerable professional polish. It is funny, fantastical, occasionally ridiculous, and unexpectedly moving; a real-life story of sisters, grief, identity, and belonging disguised as one enormous Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Audiences should be aware that the production includes theatrical combat and violence, flashing and other intense lighting effects, loud sounds and shouting, mild profanity, and discussions of bullying, sexuality, identity, and death. For audiences comfortable with those elements, there are plenty of reasons to roll the dice on this adventure.

SHE KILLS MONSTERS

Written by Qui Nguyen

Theater Company: Mary Moody Northen Theatre

Venue: 3001 S. Congress Ave., Austin, TX

September 17, 18, 19, 24, 25 and 26 , 2026 at 7:30 p.m.

September 20 and 27 at 2:00 p.m.

Running Time: 2 hours, one 15-minute intermission

Tickets: $18.50-$32

Reader Reviews

To post a comment, you must register and login.