This is Drama Masks, a Bay Area performing arts column from a born San Franciscan and longtime theatre artist in an N95 mask. I talk venue safety and dramatic substance, or the lack thereof.
At the risk of having to surrender my Gen X nerd credentials, I have to admit that I’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons. Not once. Oh, I’ve played plenty of board games and love a good role-playing game (though I’m more of a “It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this”-style action RPG kinda guy), but I’ve never taken part in G. Gary Gygax’s half-century-old franchise. (Well, unless you count the 2000 film, which couldn’t even be saved by a Richard O’Brien cameo.)
Still, the series has left such an indelible impression on the world that you may allude to it on a regular basis without even knowing it. The first game premiered one year after JRR Tolkien died, and the game’s popularity helped proliferate the fantasy elements the late author made central to his most-beloved book series (the one with the hobbits). And since pop culture mainstays are practically fruit for the pickin’ for sketch troupe Killing My Lobster, it was probably inevitable that table-top RPGs (TTRPGs) would eventually come into the company’s sights.
Of course, one can’t mention KML’s latest show, Legends & Laughter (through September 13 at Eclectic Box) without acknowledging that it’ll be their last show for the foreseeable future. A great deal has been written about this already (including by me), so let’s just say that while it hung over the show like a dark cloud, it didn’t rain on anyone’s parade on opening night. The delayed BART trains did that.
Before the show begins, the set is itself a sight-gag: a folding table with standing gameboard from which the dungeon master rules with absolute power; various mini-bags of Doritos, Cheetos, and Lays amongst plastic bottles of Mountain Dew and PowerAde. It’s practically nerd’s den 101. Projected on the upstage wall are images of past KML programs, as well as tongue-in-cheek glossary terms for those unfamiliar with the genre or game format. The tips include such bon mots as “[Dungeon Masters] range from benign to authoritarian” and how the d20 is “the sluttiest die”.
We begin with our quintet of Craigslist-gathered players coming together for a standard game, only to find themselves transported into the fantasy setting itself. (Yes, they mentioned the Jumanji-ness of it all.) This leads to the traditional KML opening song parody, in which the Flashdance theme “Maniac” instead describes an orc attack. Like you do.
The first of the hour’s sketches starts off on a high note, with G. Gary Gygax (Max Seijas) pitching his future franchise-maker to a friend (Derek Jones), who’s less than enthusiastic about a game that promotes racial caste systems and has more paperwork than an accounting course. The following sketch is equally strong, with an enthusiastic DM (Melissa Claire) having made the grave mistake of hosting a game played by a recently separated couple (Brigitte Losey and Chuck Lacson) who don’t even bother with subtleties when describing their chosen characters.
As with most of KML’s genre deconstructions, the biggest laughs come from lampooning the cringe-inducing elements that fans would rather overlook. This leads to a sketch for a woke revision called “Dungeons & DEI” in a player is told that his empathy and anxiety rolls make him “basically fantasy-MAGA”. Another sketch, “ASMR for DMs”, has Jones attempting to soothe the minds of the aforementioned game lords as they inevitably grow ever-frustrated by the tantrums of players around the table. There’s even sketch about the “Satanic Panic” of the ‘80s, which D&D somehow got swept up in, because Reaganites took any excuse to clutch their pearls.
Help us save local journalism!
Every tax-deductible donation helps us grow to cover the issues that mean the most to our community. Become a 48 Hills Hero and support the only daily progressive news source in the Bay Area.
Sketches like these work off the wider cultural context and don’t require an intimacy with the games to find them funny. (Even the ASMR one works for anyone who’s been around people that get on their nerves for an extended length of time.)
Less effective are swing-and-miss sketches lampooning the series’ sexism by having a barmaid with a backstory (this one would have worked better as a mid-sketch joke than its own piece). One sketch, in which two first-daters roll dice to choose the next stage of the date, works better conceptually than it does in practice. One where a “Barbarian American” (Claire) reads aloud her university admissions letter is saved by Claire’s committed delivery rather than any actual dialogue. Better sketches include a medieval-set contemporary city planning commission meeting about that strange fantasy land called “San Francisco” and whether horses should go down the center lane of Valencia.
Yet, the cast fly high with every piece they’re given. As directed by KML veteran Jan Gilbert, there’s an innate sense of what buttons to push to make a good KML sketch. Most of the cast have worked with the company before, but Losey fits so easily into the pool of company regulars that you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d seen her in a KML piece before. She jumps from sketch-to-sketch playing an ingenue die (left over from a game of Yahtzee) to a redneck dad trying to add ‘Nam guerilla warfare to his son’s campaign to a certain small-handed dictator who’s threatened to send the National Guard to SF and Oakland. That she could get so many laughs from portraying someone so hateable proved how well Losey blends into the experienced ensemble.
The opening night house was all-but-full, the gaps likely due to the aforementioned BART delays. There were a handful of masked patrons besides me, a few of whom seemed to mask up upon seeing me. The ever-cramped Eclectic Box saw my Aranet4’s CO² begin to creep up before the show even began. They peaked around 2,156ppm before the final bow.
That final bow was followed by executive director Emma McCool’s voice noticeably shaking as she emphasized that the company was taking “a pause” rather than experiencing complete extinction. She put equal emphasis on the fact that the goals of KML were “[producing] comedy and paying artists”.
It’s unfortunate that KML and other companies have to struggle or fold in their attempts to meet those two goals at once. Still, as Legends & Laughter is KML’s last work until further notice, it’s a high note on which to leave its longtime fans and the newly curious alike. Pre-show glossary or not, a lot of the audience won’t pick up on all the in-jokes that come with years of TTRPG familiarity. What they will pick up on is the frustration of trying to enjoy yourself through recreation, only for your fellow players to make you want to pull your hair out. That’s a universal experience.
It’s a genuinely funny show with more strong points than weak ones, and it’s a exemplary of the skills at which KML excels.
KILLING MY LOBSTER’S LEGENDS & LAUGHTER runs through September 13. Eclectic Box, SF. Tickets and more info here.
