She Kills Monsters

Now let's step back even further.  The night of the last big big snowstorm of the season [March 30-31], I dragged my family over to Inver Grove Heights to see She Kills Monsters.  They had no ideas what to expect. I had only told them it was a play with a Dungeons and Dragons theme.

This was an amazing play and the community theater folks at Black Dirt did an amazing job.   The writer for this play went on to write some of the Disney animated fare and you can see why.  In a nutshell, a teenager and her parents die in a car crash.  Her older sister while going through her stuff finds a Dungeons and Dragons homebrew module that she wants to play [as a n00b to the game and role playing] so she gets a student to help her through some sessions.  While playing, she learns more about her sister than she knew while her sister was alive, including who she loved IRL, who loved her, what her sister found as shortcomings in the older sisters boyfriend [which he overcomes by joining in the game], and more.

The staging was great with wonderful fights and puppets and tricks.

This bit in the playbill amused me....I wasn't sure what to expect.

What I didn't expect was a full five-headed dragon "puppet".  That shit was amazing.  Really put the community in community theater.

Something that struck me during my reading this month, was that when I was reading this book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56175912-the-cleveland-heights-lgbtq-sci-fi-and-fantasy-role-playing-club I realized that it was trying to be what this play was.  Trying hard and mostly failing at every single point.  If you ever want to read that book, just set it aside and go find a showing of this play instead.

When the play let out, we were in the middle of a HUGE snowstorm.  Took us over thirty minutes to get back from IGH and it was getting dicey toward the end.  Good timing on the play's part.  Another thirty minutes and we might have been in trouble.  But the family agreed it was a good night out despite the end of evening danger.