Phoenix Tears Productions
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My work with Phoenix Tears has allowed me to work with a medium I wouldn't have considered previously--immersive and interactive theater. Through my work with them, I have been able to develop immersive works that follow a format to allow for varied levels of participation. Over 11 shows, we have worked to develop a format that is easily adapted to any type of story we are looking to tell.
Among my work with our Murder Mysteries, I am also on the board and function as a Production Manager where necessary. I have coordinated tech for many of our shows in the past, and acted as a Stage Manager for our more traditional productions. I have worked with our team to develop many of our props over the years. As a small theatre group, we have not often had any budget to accomplish the vision of our shows and that has given us a chance to focus on developing environmental shows that do not need a ton of scenic elements to convey the story. It has also meant we need to get creative with the prop items we do need to use, like making props with items we already have on hand. |
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They're Doing All This Stuff
Front of Promo Postcard - Designed and Drawn by Me
Back of Promo Postcard
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Winner of Critic's Choice for Outstanding Site-Specific Show at Orlando Fringe 2025, They're Doing All this Stuff was an interactive text-message-based show created by myself and Mallory Vance where the audience members took on the role of a member of the "AOD" (Agents of DeSantis, though never explicitly named via text) to uncover what really happened at the so-called "arts festival." Playing off of the Governor's comments toward the festival in a press conference in 2024 where he pulled arts funding because money went to festivals like the Fringe (both Orlando and Tampa) which were "sexual festivals." In a parody of that, the AOD was attempting to infiltrate the Fringe to get to the truth.
In a show meant to encourage active participation within the festival via missions that required you to "see a show in the yellow venue and report back" or "attend the opening party for the Visual Fringe Gallery and ask 3 people why they were there," audience members were invited to build community with their fellow agents alongside other guests around them. The show was successful in encouraging participation in aspects of the festival that some audience members may not have experienced in the past, all while being a relatively low effort on the two-person team running the back-end. Culminating in a covert meeting with an experienced agent on the ground to receive a final package, the experience allowed for guests to participate at any point over the 12-day festival at their leisure. Overall the experience was a low-effort, high-reward experience on the part of Phoenix Tears as well as on the Fringe Festival, and there are plans to expand the experience to other Fringe Festivals as the "Agents of Fringe," a free offering to encourage engagement in Fringe Festivals across the country and beyond. |
Visual Fringe Tie-In
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Two pieces of Art were created by the "AOD" (myself) and put in the Visual Fringe Gallery for use as a meeting point for in person interactions, along with an immersion factor of the AOD trying to infiltrate the festival.
One piece, called "Sexual Festival" featured show postcard images from shows that have been performed at the festival in the past that the Governor might have found offensive, with the offensive parts censored/blacked out. "the fringe festival, which is like a sexual festival where they're doing all this stuff," a quote from the Governor written over top of the censored postcards. All art in the Visual Fringe Gallery is also for sale, so of course, this 36"x36" piece was priced at $69.
The second piece was a smaller 24"x24' piece in the same vein, where pages from books that have been banned across the state of Florida have had everything but the offensive parts blacked out (to showcase how little is actually causing these bans), with banned written over all the pages in large print alongside a rainbow of smaller banned writing. |
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Mission Complete - Welcome Special Agent
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Audience members who experienced the show were given a secret code to collect a badge that signified to others that they were working with the AOD--the "I'm Doing All This Stuff Badge." Once they completed a set number of missions, they were ready to meet in person with one of our trained agents on the ground who would hand over a "package" that consisted of a bag proclaiming that they, in fact, "Did all this stuff." Inside the bag they would find a personalized letter on "official" AOD Letterhead detailing their accomplishments and welcoming them into the fold as a secret agent, as well as an Agent Pin and a certificate declaring them a Special Agent within the AOD. All of the final accomplishment handouts were design, created, and written by myself.
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The Waiting Room
The Waiting Room is an immersive experience, created by myself and Mallory Vance, combining silent disco technology, an online mystery, and a waiting room environment that was first presented at the 2024 Orlando Fringe Festival. Since then it has been presented in Bellingham, WA, and at various US Fringe Festivals.
Guests are invited to join the Waiting Room, an experience presented by 94.4 WAIT FM, to have the chance for their number to be called to meet with an agent. Once receiving a number, guests are briefed on the how to use the headphones and left to experience the space on their own. There are 3 tracks to listen to; Red - Our Radio Station, 94.4, hosted by DJ Dusk and featuring real indie musicians. Blue - Our Hold Line, with increasingly unsettling music while a reassuring voice reminds you that you are important to us. And Green - A Sponsor Track, Little Chirps, with a talk-radio type channel that features ads for Watcher Brand products, guided meditation, advice, and more. How a guest interacts with the experience is entirely up to them, but listening to any track should point them toward waitfm.com where things get a little weird and they can start to uncover the beings behind the experience, and what they may want with you. |
You’re here. You’re waiting. 
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A Host Encounter
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Through forms, information gleaned from audio tracks, interactions with the Host and any Interns working (two actor roles in the main space), guests were able to glean what was going on behind the scenes, leading to a better chance of being seen by this mysterious Agent.
Each Agent encounter was up to the discretion of the actor in the space, though a character overview was given to inform the choices being made. This left each guest that was able to have an encounter, with a totally unique experience that could be repeated with no concerns of having the exact same experience. |
An Agent Encounter
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Murder Mysteries
Bleeding Hearts Club at Orlando Fringe ArtSpace Feb. 2023
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Over the last 7 years I have developed 11 different Murder Mysteries using a format designed by myself and Ginger Potter, a co-founder of Phoenix Tears Productions and former Technical Director. We designed the format of the show to allow for all types of audiences--from the extra-social to the extra-introverted, there is a way for everyone to participate and have access to the same information. As a person who is interested in Interactive and Immersive theater and also on the side of the audience that is interested more in watching the action than participating, it was important to me that we focus efforts to build a type of immersive and interactive theater that did not demand either of those things from the audience who was not comfortable with it.
Many of our Murder Mysteries, including our very first were developed for CONjuration, a Harry Potter/Magical Fantasy convention in Atlanta, GA. With that in mind, those shows were rooted deeply in the lore of the Harry Potter Universe. Working within an established canon to pull out obscure lore and create a little of our own that suited the setting was our goal with the Harry Potter themed shows. |
Death Day Players
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For many of our Mysteries performed in Orlando, and all of our shows done for CONjuration, we worked under a breakout of Phoenix Tears, the Death Day Players. The concept for these shows being that there is a troupe of Ghost actors who come together on the anniversary of one of their players' deaths to recreate the moments leading up to the death. Each member of the troupe mingles with the audience during the load-in and then presents the premise with the featured player. Once the premise is explained, the featured player (aka the Victim of the evening) hands out roles to each of the other players of people that were around for the moment they died and we begin the top of whatever event was happening at the time of their death. The audience then is invited to participate as much and they'd like and interact with the troupe as people who would have been there for the death while watching for motive--seeing little scenes play out while every so often having their attention drawn to a bigger scene relevant to the story. The show would then culminate with the death of our featured player and breakout into a portion for the audience to interview the troupe as to their motives and have their chance to guess who the murderer was.
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Part of our Ghost Troupe from CONjuration 2018 with a fan.
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Prop Work
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Through all of our Murder Mysteries and other shows, I have worked to create props needed alongside the rest of our board. Ginger and I handmade two sets of fairy wings for our first site-specific Fringe show in 2017, Stardust Kingdom/Stardust After Dark. One set is the one pictured here, and another was a slightly different shaped set of blue wings that did not light up.
They were crafted to look like a child's drawing, while leading our cast and audience on a physical walk through the real streets around the Orlando Shakespeare Theater.
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