With nearly four years of sold-out shows under their belt, the San Antonio show comedy production is now appearing at the Woodlawn as its ambitions grow.
SAN ANTONIO — If you’ve never heard or even wondered why a close-knit group of improv comedians would sing “How to roll a diiiice” to the tune of The Fray’s “How to Save a Life,” you’ve probably never been to a Monsternomicon show.
A no-holds-barred, all-adult-audiences-welcome experience that blends improv comedy with Dungeons and Dragons, the Monsternomicon crew might have thought the idea was niche when they graced the stage for the first time in the the fall of 2021.
But after nearly four years of sold-out shows and appearances at festivals beyond San Antonio, they’ve discovered a passionate community affirming what they knew all along: You don’t need to roll a proverbial high number to see the roguish charm in colliding the hilarity of improv with the rules of Dungeons and Dragons, colloquially known as DnD.
“The freedom of knowing you’re in a high-fantasy world makes the improv more absurd, and knowing there will be some sort of narrative structure kind of allows you to get crazier as well,” said Andre Villaplana, who helped start Monsternomicon in the tail-end of the pandemic.
Over the course of those monthly shows, Monsternomicon hasn’t just sent audience members into hysterics; it’s also continued to build, ever impressively, a single ongoing narrative (or “campaign,” in DnD parlance) focusing on three adventurers and their various run-ins with the “NPCs” (non-playable characters, anything from kings and queens to peasants and monsters) played by fellow Monsternomicon-ers.
The main “adventurers” grow, literally leveling up from month to month. The NPCs ruffle through costumes and props to meet the comedic moment.
“We try to make it a spectacle,” Villaplana says. “We make a big show of the introductions, because we have to go in assuming the audience doesn’t know about DnD.”
He spoke with KENS 5 before rehearsal one recent summer evening at the north side’s Little Improv Theater, which has served as the troupe’s home base for four years.
The 50-set venue is a cozy headquarters built for intimate audiences. But in the case of Monsternomicon, they also found a loyal one—a fanbase eager to be swept along for a ride in which anything from Studio Ghibli and werewolves to time travel and tragic fictional backstories is up for grabs…
So long as any detours in the story fit DnD rules.
A spectacle of absurdism, DnD-style
The first of Villaplana’s roughly dozen Monsternomicon crewmates had just started to arrive for rehearsal on this June evening when the chemistry and imagination they’ve been honing for almost four years started to reveal itself.
It’s a regularly scheduled rehearsal, but they start out by debriefing on their recent show at the Woodlawn Theater—a venue roughly 20 times the size of The Little Improv that Monsternomicon had been invited to perform in for the first time, to a crowd of about 200.
They talk pre-show bits and what to do at intermission, review where our three main characters left off and what wild scenaiors they might find themselves in next. Eventually they’ll take the stage, the only sure thing being the uncertainty of what happens next.
“It was just a fun way to write a story and live in it, play as a character,” said Mitchell Murphy, a Monsternomicon member who’s also one of its passionate DnD fans. “I feel like I’m one of the sticklers for the rules, but it’s fun because you get to help out other players.”
Nearby lie props like a bread roller, plushie dinosaurs and a giant, foam version of the 20-sided die normally used in DnD. When it’s tossed into the audience, the show officially begins.
Also nearby, sitting in the front row with a pen and pad in hand while rolling a (regular-sized) die every few moments, is David Donnel. He’s a longtime DnD partner of Villaplana’s and serves as Monsternomicon’s Rules Laywer to ensure players are taking the right actions and casting the right spells afforded to their characters, per DnD rules.
It’s one thing that Donnel leans in by coming into every show to the “Law & Order” theme song. It’s another thing that he’s an actual lawyer who takes his Monsternomicon role seriously.
“While rules are certainly a part of what makes DnD fun in terms of establishing stakes and giving some structure to it, that has to compliment the ultimate objective, which is entertain the audience,” he says.
Any major show-defining narrative move a Monsternomicon character makes needs the right dice roll to succeed. As performer Brennan Loy puts it, “they’re just as likely to fail, and we have to adjust accordingly onstage. It really creates feeling that anything can happen.”
Villaplana, meanwhile, suits up as the “dungeon master.” He effectively hosts and narrates the proceedings, taking his place on the stage as the story’s next chapter begins to be formed.
Before long on this evening, Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” starts to blare out, and they’re off—a group of collaborators feeding off each other’s desire to entertain, and to consider every possible way to do it.
“This show is going downhill every day,” Villaplana muses amusingly at one point. By which he means, this escapade is operating at the peak of its absurdist powers.
Villaplana, a lifelong San Antonian who has been playing DnD since 2013 or so, started Monsternomicon in late 2021. But its roots go back to a pre-COVID iteration of the show and a pandemic-era podcast he and a couple friends started “to keep ourselves sane.”
When theaters and public performing spaces started to slowly reopen in summer of 2021, Villaplana and company got right to work shedding their pandemic-era isolation by getting together to create some laughs. He collaborated early on with two friends, sharing his planned premise of capturing monsters in a magical book—that led to a cofounder coming up with the name Monsternomicon, a riff on the iconic “Evil Dead” book.
The group reached out to the best improv comedians they remembered meeting before COVID who had stuck around and aligned with their sense of humor. Many of them had never played DnD before, but that only further laid the foundations for more chaos that the crew must improvise, act and laugh its way through.
It makes for a slightly more complex kind of improv, which usually consists of performers sauntering in and out of wild scenarios with little regard for continuity. Blended with the structure of Dungeons and Dragons role-playing, Monsternomicon narrativizes the comedy while keeping things weird.
“We’re not going for ‘Hamlet,'” Villaplana says. “It’s really more ‘Futurama.’ Zany and sort of integrating the improv instincts of going with the flow and jumping on the funniest idea into the physical action of what a DnD game onstage would look like.”
In September 2021, Monsternomicon took the stage for the first time.
“The audience was so ready for something to come out of the pandemic,” Villaplana says. “And I think us being their first and us feeding off of each other really set the tone that we’ve been carrying.”
Growing their audience
You don’t commit to the kind of eccentricity Monsternomicon specializes in without making a few friends, and that’s what the crew consists of.
“We support each other’s ideas and build off of them,” says Stephanie Melcher, who plays one of the show’s three primary adventurers. “And with this group there are so many hilarious ideas that I, being the new kid, felt a bit intimidated at first. But the more time and shows passed, the more I felt myself fitting right into their big metaphorical pea pod.”
Villaplana concurs, referring to Monsternomicon as his main creative outlet.
“You’re creating characters in the moment, embodying them fully, giving them a life and then killing them just as quickly–often faster in our show,” he says with a laugh. “It’s cool to be a part of something that people like.”
And also something that people return to again and again.
Because the Little Improv Theater has such limited seating, it’s become increasingly common that Monsternomicon will sell a show out a month ahead of time. It’s gotten to the point recently where they’ll have just two or three new audience members; the rest are dedicated fans eager to catch the next chapter of the journey.
“It’s a beautiful, comfortable blanket,” Monsternomicon member Venny Mortimer says of the show. “I’ve had fans come up to me and be like, ‘Oh, we wrote a story about your character,’ or, ‘I did drawings of your character.’ It’s really been cool to connect with community and tell stories that they genuinely vibe with.”
At the bigger Woodlawn Theater – where the troupe has performed twice so far – Monsternomicon has been able to expand its audience while taking advantage of technological upgrades like a massive LED wall behind the stage.
They’ll return to the Woodlawn again Saturday night. Villaplana’s hope is that Monsternomicon becomes a mainstay there, calling it “as close to the original version that I could perceive.”
“It’s almost like we have a brand-new canvas to really stretch out and experiment in,” he says. “I thought we brought the same horrible flavor we always pack in. There’s a lot more distance, but we still felt their presence.”
Villaplana wore an Austin Sketch Fest shirt on the night of this rehearsal. A few weeks later, Monsternomicon would reach another milestone—packing their props and driving to iO Fest in Chicago, where they took the stage at historic venues in their first out-of-state performances.
A typical Monsternomicon show can run two hours; at iO Fest, they had 25 minutes. That created a challenge the crew embraced, both with Monsternomicon and the offshoot sketch show Villaplana called a highlight of the trip.
“Getting to do stuff we’d written and worked on in SA up on a legendary comedy stage was really special.”
For any potential future audience members, Villaplana makes sure to note the show is “explicitly explicit” (case in point: 18 and up only). Nothing is off the table, but that’s what keeps things interesting—and keeps their voices as creatively pure as they can be.
“We’re very lucky to have a dozen people that are like-minded who are all pretty close friends (and) who all work together collectively to create something that other people enjoy,” he said. “Almost no one has that.”
Tickets to Monsternomicon’s Saturday show at the Woodlawn Theater (1920 Fredericksburg Road) cost $15 and can be purchased here.