When I was in high school, I self-identified as a Live Action Role Player. My friends and I would build weapons out of PVC pipe, foam and duct tape, put on costumes, and fight imaginary battles. It was a good life, and we were the coolest people we knew. I had a 7-foot-tall beast of a classmate whose real name was Hrothgar. On the weekend, he became a troll who wielded a warhammer made from an entire couch cushion folded in half, stuck on the end of a pole and covered with duct tape. In my most legendary victory, I defeated him with two swords because we didn’t think very deeply about how to account for balance of power when we made up the rules.

This is a play about LARPers who take their games much more seriously than I ever took mine. They fight not for points and bragging rights, but for control of the universe they've built in their basement. As much as they try to escape into their fantasies, the troubles of the real world always seem to creep in at the edges. Subtle gender tensions and unacknowledged prejudices snowball onto a scale that threatens to tear their imaginary world to shreds. When the chivalric originators of the Patriarchy suddenly find themselves in a world where women rule, the group teeters on the brink of Helene Cixous' ominous vision of the human endgame: "when the Phallic period has ended, women will have been either annihilated or borne up to the highest and most violent incandescence." (Did I mention that I started reading psychoanalytical feminist literary criticism about the same time I got into LARP? It was a weird time.)

But you don't have to go that deep if you don't want to. If you came for the laughs and nostalgia, we've got plenty of those for you too. Enjoy.