On Wednesday, April 20, the DHS advanced and intermediate acting classes will have the first showing of their Spring play, She Kills Monsters, written by Qui Nguyen. The play is about a girl who goes on a journey through her dead sister’s Dungeons and Dragons game to get to know her sister better.

The class will be performing shows every day from Wednesday, April 20th to Sunday, April 24th. The Wednesday show will be an understudy show.

“I love hanging out with my classmates, and learning stage combat is really fun,” Cecilie Frazee said, the student actor for the dead sister, Tilly Evans. Preparations for the play were all done during class time, including rehearsals, set design, and costumes. The entire cast prepared for the play during their 90-minute class periods, beginning in February. 

The set design and costumes are a very important part of the story, “Half of [the play] is set in a Dungeons and Dragons fantasy realm, so costumes, lights, and props are really important in helping the audience believe what is happening is real,” Norah Jeziorowski said, a crew member in She Kills Monsters.

This class already has accomplishments from this fall, when they won the Regional GHSA One-Act Competition. Actors were nominated for individual awards as well; Frazee was nominated and won Best Actress for her role as Vinceza in the play.

The script of She Kills Monsters, however, has been criticized by the public due to its use of homophobic slurs by certain characters, “we had a lot of conversations about how those are terrible things to say to a person, … it’s important to realize that those kinds of things happen in real life as well, and by raising awareness maybe we can help people understand why [using slurs] so wrong,” Frazee said.

The play was recognized and given a media award from GLAAD, an LGBT+ media monitoring organization that advocates for “fair, accurate, and inclusive representations” of the LGBT+ community.

Tickets for the play are being sold online at https://ticketpeak.co/DHSPerforms/events. Tickets for students will cost $10 each and for those who don’t attend DHS, they will cost $12.