RoiZIZO théâtre: I Killed the Monster

Tabletop Toy Tornado: Observations on I Killed the Monster

An Essay by Scott T. Cummings

On a Saturday night in Steppenwolf’s Garage Theater, a man in a plaid shirt walks onstage in bare feet, a bit scruffy and disheveled. He pauses for a moment, then sits at a small table with a lamp above it, rests his forearms on it, and looks out at the audience with a quizzical, mischievous stare. This is Gildwen Peronno of RoiZIZO théâtre, part clown, part magician, part storyteller. The mischief he will make gets more and more manic as his 35-minute solo performance gathers momentum. 

I Killed the Monster is a B-movie horror film made for a tabletop theater. It takes its title from a song by the American outsider singer-artist Daniel Johnston, who died in 2019 around the time that Peronno accepted a commission to create a short-form theater piece inspired by a popular song. The thematic link between Johnston’s defiant song and Peronno’s zany, anarchic creation is open to interpretation, but there is a madcap, low-tech, do-it-yourself quality to both. And there is a monster. 

The plot focuses on Daniel, a skittish loner in a quiet French village who somehow is selected for a one-week, mail-order drug trial. The opening sequence introduces the show’s freewheeling style. Using small toys and everyday objects that seem to appear out of nowhere, Peronno stages step-by-step the overseas UPS delivery of the experimental drugs to Daniel’s home. His sense of humor and attention to detail are signaled when the delivery van (represented by a plastic mammoth) stops at a café on his way across town so that the driver can have a coffee break. Peronno provides his own numerous sound effects—the squeal of the brakes, the whoosh of the espresso machine—and when the pit stop is over, he hangs the toy demitasse from the horns of the beast and the van-mammoth moves on across the table. 

After several days on the trial drug, Daniel likes the way the little blue pills are making him feel, so he violates the protocol, increases his dose, and “goes off the deep end,” which triggers a medical emergency, a visit from the EMTs, and a transformation that turns Daniel into a handful of bright green goopy slime—with murderous intent. The slime’s victims include an annoying dog (a toy figurine), a woman he meets in a discotheque (a pair of high heels), and eventually the entire village (rows of small wooden block houses revealed when a drawer in the front of the table slides open). In this story, the stretchy, slimy monster is not killed. 

This is not an object theater piece in which the objects themselves take center stage. They function more like punchlines or gags in Peronno’s antic storytelling. A windup toy illustrates that Daniel was an avid swimmer. He dons a swimming mask and snorkel and takes his pills by dropping them into the tube. In another scene, he holds up an empty picture frame as a window through which a man yells at his barking dog in the yard below; when the dog comes under attack, Peronno struggles frantically to squeeze himself through the frame—one arm and head first, torso and hips next, right down to the feet—in order to get “outside” for a rescue attempt. Again and again, object theater yields to physical comedy. 

Peronno orchestrates the mounting chaos with a spirit that is by turns whimsical and maniacal. Sometimes he is the narrator shocked by the gory details of the unfolding horror. Sometimes he presents multiple characters in rapid succession, switching accents to portray, for example, three distinct drunk guys in a bar. He shifts focus with a turn of the head or sometimes just a glance with his eyes. He pivots the lampshade to narrow the light on the table; he samples theme music from classic films and TV shows (The Shining, Twin Peaks) to underscore the tension. Helter-skelter, and delighted with himself all the while, he rushes to keep up as objects careen through the air and across the table. 

At moments, the pace slows a bit as Peronno disengages from the narrative to give one of his props a moment in the spotlight and engage with it as the object that it is. The most memorable of these is when he simply plays with the amorphous wad of green slime in his hands. He stretches it thin to make different shapes. He throws it down on the table to hear the splat. He stares at it to see if maybe it will move on its own. In this moment, representative of the entire performance, the free spirit of pure play prevails. He is like a kid sitting alone on the floor of his bedroom, surrounded by random toys and household objects, inventing a wild story in which any thing at hand can represent whatever you want it to be because the imagination makes it so, however incongruous or absurd. 

Peronno is a skilled and commanding performer. He knows what he is doing. His comic timing and keen sense of the audience allow for moments of spontaneous embellishment, but the mayhem is planned and executed with care. Still, on a different level, I cannot ever recall a performance that felt more like just watching a child at play, pure and simple. Whatever the malevolence represented by the monstrous green slime, I Killed the Monster is animated by an artless innocence that is both captivating and funny.