Hi Katie!
Great to hear you’re giving The Events Calendar a solid test run. 🙂
We’re a bit limited with how much support we can provide for our free version, especially in our Pre-Sales forum.
What I can tell you though is that is sounds like you just need to head over to Events > Settings > Display > Events Template and change that to “Default Events Template” – this will likely help override any theme issues that may be shrinking that calendar up as you mentioned.
Have an excellent rest of the week!