Chicago Tribune - Recommended
"...You'd easily think that "She Kills Monsters" the clever, funny, moving, lively and delightfully geeky standout at this year's Garage Rep at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, was entirely created by Buzz22 Chicago, a very young theater company created by very youthful, very recent and very talented graduates of Northwestern University. The roles are so well-cast and the homemade theatricality so seemingly organic, you'd swear these guys spent some time at the House Theatre of Chicago - or watching StarKid Productions or videos of the old Defiant Theatre - and just decided to create an offspring of those companies, starring themselves. Scott Weinstein's production sits that easily on its likable performers' bodies in motion."
Chicago Sun Times - Highly Recommended
"...Inspired by the phenomenally successful role-playing game, "Dungeons & Dragons" (in which, ordinarily, I have zero interest), Nguyen's 95-minute, action-packed play is a sort of epic, live-action anime as it uses the essential elements of that game to chronicle the quest of twentysomething Agnes (Katherine Banks), a straight-arrow teacher living in Athens, Ohio in the 1990s. After the tragic death of her 15-year-old sister, Tilly (the ideally Peter Pan-like Jessica London-Shields), Agnes finally tries to get to know the shy, nerdy (lesbian-leaning) younger sister with whom she had nothing in common."
Chicago Reader - Highly Recommended
"...Buzz22's staging of She Kills Monsters is the great crowd-pleaser of the bunch. And justly so. Described on his website as "playwright, screenwriter, geek," Qui Nguyen vividly conjures the underground nerd world of Athens, Ohio, in 1995, when the Internet was operating at a mind-boggling 56 kilobytes per second."
Time Out Chicago - Highly Recommended
"...Set in 1995, Monsters wrings much of its humor from deliciously dorky references to the early days of the Internet and mid-'90s TV. As consummate in-crowder Agnes (Katherine Banks) discovers the inner (and ended) life of high-school outsider Tilly (Jessica London-Shields) via rolls of the dice, Scott Weinstein's production mines genuine emotion amid the swords-and-sorcery goofiness. Although Nguyen drops the ball on a couple of tangential subplots, extraordinarily accomplished design elements make this a geeky must-see."
Stage and Cinema - Recommended
"...But this is a show about embracing nerd culture, not mocking it. Instead, Chuck becomes one of the play’s most endearing characters, managing the balance between awkward and forceful when he needs to be while overall showing the warmth and good nature so important to the play. Set in a small Ohio town in 1995, the show starts with decidedly average Agnes losing her parents and little sister in a car accident. In an attempt to get to know Tilly (Jessica London-Shields), who she never really understood in life, she asks Chuck to run a Dungeons & Dragons campaign that Tilly wrote. Soon she’s immersed in the fantasy world her sister created and populated with sexy demons, fairies with a taste for blood and menacing shape shifters."
ChicagoCritic - Not Recommended
"...There was no particularly effective performances to anchor this sprawling incoherent show. This show proves that, indeed, more can be way too much. When a show depends on wild action to cover an implausible story with unsympathetic characters, it grains on our patience. I couldn't wait until this show ended!"
