Phoenix Tears Work

Phoenix Tears Productions

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.

Murder Mysteries

Bleeding Hearts Club at Orlando Fringe ArtSpace Feb. 2023

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

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.

Part of our Ghost Troupe from CONjuration 2018 with a fan.

Prop Work

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.

Between the two of us we crafted these wings out of thick metal wire and faux flowers that had a wire base to be poseable. From there, we wrapped the solid wire with embroidery floss and, utilizing a dream-catcher style knotting system, knotted the design that makes up the face of the wings. From there, we added small fairly lights wrapped through the embroidery floss in a way that makes them almost invisible in the daylight and other flowers to accent the wings. These wings have help up to extensive movement and fight choreography that had our actor falling to the ground on them, and to this day are used for our continuing shows in the Stardust Universe.

These photos also showcase the maps that were made on the canvas for our children's show.

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.