She Kills Monsters boasts a ton of opportunities to show off creative fight choreography. Scene 5 in particular ends with a “high-energy montage of badassery” where the main characters “kick ass by killing a crap-load of different monsters in an assortment of different ways from badass to comedic.” The script suggests including all sorts of iconic fantasy creatures to make the scene into a D&D nerd’s wet dream.

I designed all my monsters using Wintercroft papercraft mask templates as my starting point, so I was modestly limited to what monsters I could reasonably create. Skeletons seemed like a pretty straightforward option– what fantasy adventure doesn’t involve re-animated skeletons at one point or another? I decided to use a skull template to create a couple of liches for this scene. For the uninitiated, a lich is made when a powerful magic-user performs a ritual to remove their soul and become and undead creature in order to gain more power. The “soul” (or what’s left of it, anyway) is then stored outside the body in a phylactery. This means the lich can’t be damaged by regular means: if you want to kill a lich, you’ll have to destroy its phylactery.

This felt like excellent fodder for some interesting fight choreo. There are so many fights in the show, I felt like it was important to get some new gimmicks now and then. I choreographed this segment of the montage so that each lich (4 total) had a staff with an orb on top. The party would be scattered by the difficult enemies, each rushing in and out for a sort of Scooby Doo-style chase sequence. Agnes, cornered and alone, would destroy the orb on her attacker’s staff in desperation, and realize that this is the secret to defeating the rest. One by one, she would help the party destroy the rest of the orbs. This offered an opportunity to show Agnes growing as a smarter, more resourceful D&D player. (“Plus one in being less of a dumbass!”)

When I choreographed this, I didn’t yet have a plan for these staffs topped with breakable orbs– I had vague thoughts of sugar glass, or maybe something clever done with balloons?

The solution I landed on was even simpler. We were already hand-making the staffs– I found that covering a tall wooden dowel in glue and stuffing it into the hole in the center of a pool noodle makes for a boffer weapon that you can hit someone really hard with before it hurts. (Few of my actors had prior stage combat experience, so I really wanted all the weapons to be nice and soft, just in case. Regular pool noodles make for fun practice weapons, too!) For the orbs, I purchased some clear plastic balls that came in two halves. I gave them a gentle dusting of spray paint so they looked sort of mystical/crystal-ball-like, and then just hot glued them onto the ends of the staffs. The result was something easily “breakable”– the actors could rip the orbs off the staffs or break them in half, and we could just put the halves back together and glue them back in their spots before the next show.

I tested the orbs myself and felt like they were perfect for our needs. It only took some light pressure to make the two halves pop apart. And, if we went a little overboard and broke a few, it would be fine! The set I bought came with plenty of extras.

I showed the staffs to the cast. I pointed out how easily they broke– just apply a light squeeze, or a gentle “stage stomp,” and then the liches would die dramatically, and we’d glue the whole thing back together for another night. We ran the choreo and everything went perfectly.

I also mentioned that it wasn’t a big deal if we broke some of them.

Over the next couple days of rehearsals, we ran the fight scene a number of times. The actor playing Agnes broke one or two of the orbs– no biggie, we had extras, and anyway her choreography was kind of physical compared to everyone else’s, so I had sort of expected a couple of the orbs to get smashed in the crossfire.

What followed from the start of tech week to the end can only be called an orb massacre. What started as Agnes breaking one or two quickly became all of the actors breaking every orb. It was such a slaughter that I was convinced they were doing it on purpose. I’d said they only needed LIGHT pressure, I never said to blast them all to pieces!

We began running out of plastic balls. At notes after dress rehearsal, I asked the cast, “can we try not to smash so many of the orbs during the lich fight?”, and you would have thought I asked them to try doing the scene while levitating 3 feet off the ground.

Someone said, “but I thought you said we had backups!”

I said, “HAD backups, yes!” But not enough backups to replace every orb every night for a week!

We managed to scrape through all the performances with JUST enough– we had to use some orb halves that were only slightly cracked, but not totally busted, for the final show.

Admittedly, this was totally my fault– I should have been more clear. I’m taking an indignant tone for the sake of humor, but I understand where the mix-up occurred. Directing teaches you a lot about the critical importance of specific communication!

I’ll never forget the actors looking at me like I had five heads when I asked them not to break the things I didn’t know I’d apparently invited them to break. Lesson learned: Next time I’ll tell the actors that we don’t have ANY replacements and that they need to be EXTREMELY careful, I guess! 🙂