She Kills Monsters - Review by East Bay Times

GAME ON!

‘Monsters’ a huge, geeky triumph ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ meets ’90s pop culture

By Sam Hurwitt, Correspondent

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Even if you never played “Dungeons and Dragons” (but much more so if you did), there may be multiple levels of nostalgia involved in seeing “She Kills Monsters” at La Val’s Subterranean Theater.

This show is the first Actors Ensemble of Berkeley production at La Val’s, but the North Berkeley pizza parlor basement has been home to several theater companies over the years, including Shotgun Players, Subterranean Shakespeare, Impact Theatre and currently Theatre Lunatico. This raucous “D& D” romp by Qui Nguyen feels particularly like the sort of play that Impact specialized in during its 20 years in the space.

East Bay Times Review:  GAME ON! ‘Monsters’ a huge, geeky triumph ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ meets ’90s pop culture

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Thoroughly entertaining from beginning to end, director Kayla Minton Kaufman’s staging for Actors Ensemble keeps things simple on the production side. The black box space is unadorned by scenery, and Nathaniel J. Bice’s amusing shadow puppet projections are placed on a classroomstyle overhead projector.

East Bay Times Review: GAME ON! ‘Monsters’ a huge, geeky triumph ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ meets ’90s pop culture

 <snip>

A lot of the fun comes in the fanciful fantasy character and monster designs, wonderfully captured in Lyre Alston’s costumes and Bice’s props, and the grand battles choreographed by Josephine Czarnecki are a riot. For a small-scale production of a quirky comedy, it’s an awfully big and triumphant adventure.

East Bay Times Review: GAME ON! ‘Monsters’ a huge, geeky triumph ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ meets ’90s pop culture