Student Blog: Helping Kill Monsters: Being Associate Director for SHE KILLS MONSTERS

This semester, I get the wonderful opportunity to associate direct my school's production of She Kills Monsters. Our director, Annabella Gleeson who I absolutely love and am so grateful to be working with again, has been truly amazing and when she asked me to be her AD, I could not say no. My role basically is to help Annabella with anything she needs and I also just get to be an extra set of eyes on the show. I’ve been helping with blocking and a few other things here and there as well. I love this show, I think it has a great story and working on it has been a true blast so far. We are almost done with week 2 of rehearsals and next week we start learning fight choreography and begin blocking. I can’t quite believe how fast this process has been going by and I’m trying to take it all in and soak up all that I can of it. So, let me tell ya how it’s been going so far!

We started off rehearsals with a lot of tablework which means we sit down and chat about all of the characters, their relationships with each other, some certain circumstances of the play, and other things like that. First, we did a read-through of the script where we all sat in a semi-circle and the actors could use the center of the circle as playing space where during the read through they could get up and just play. It was so fun to see and watch. After that we started tablework. We did this for two days and we went scene by scene and we all talked. Something really fun that I, personally have loved digging into was the dungeons and dragons side of things. One really cool thing about this show is that it goes back and forth from the DND world, the real world, and then also this in-between world where the main character Agnes talks to her dead sister Tilly. Hearing how all the actors interpret and want to navigate those worlds is super intriguing. It is very fun to listen in and be a part of. I also just love listening to actors speculating the choices they want to make and then also putting parts of themselves and their personalities into the show. I love tablework.

Up next, we are currently going scene by scene and doing exploration. This is where we run each scene multiple times, stopping in between each run and chatting about intentions, motives, and trying different things. This meant to just play and see what works and what doesn’t work. I think out of the two, exploration is my favorite. I think it is so helpful to be given the opportunity to get to be on your feet and try different tactics and ways of doing things. Especially with this show as well, getting to actually play around in the DND world that the character Tilly created has been crazy fun to watch. Also playing around with the DND characters in the show and how they compare/differ from their real life versions of themselves. We will also give the actors exercises to get them in the direction of the scene we want to play around with taking it. Things like “okay try this scene again, but this time you are talking to your scene partner like you are gentle parenting them” and other things like that. Sometimes it makes me laugh so so hard, and other times it makes me tear up just seeing what all the actors come up with. Exploration is also helpful when trying to block things as well, it helps us see what looks good and such as well. We are wrapping up exploration this week and it’s crazy to think that by the end of next week the show will be basically blocked.

So far, getting to work on this show has been really cool. I love DND and I think it is oh so awesome, so getting to dive into that through She Kills Monsters has made me oh so happy. I’ve loved getting to be apart of it and also working with everyone has been lovely. Everyone is so kind-hearted, hard-working and so talented. I can’t wait to see where all this show is going to go. Til next time, go do great things.