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Spotlight: "Bleeding Hearts Club" interactive V-Day murder mystery

Audience members mix with performers in a recent dress rehearsal for Phoenix Tears Productions' immersive and interactive play "Bleeding Hearts Club."
Julian Bond
Audience members mix with performers in a recent dress rehearsal for Phoenix Tears Productions' immersive and interactive play "Bleeding Hearts Club."

A murder mystery may not be the most traditional of Valentine's Day offerings, but a play called Bleeding Hearts Club does invite audience members to share the love in a very active way. It's an immersive interactive piece of theatre, which means the audience participates in the shape of the show, and sometimes even in the identity of the killer.

Megan Markham is the artistic director of Phoenix Tears Productions, the group behind this show and others like it. She explains what it means to experience immersive interactive theater.

Megan Markham:
Interactive theater, in my words, is theater that you can participate in. It's sometimes called playable theater, or immersive theater – they all kind of mean slightly different things from each other. Playable is a term in the UK that we really like it at Phoenix Tears, but it's not something that people usually understand. So we often go for interactive and immersive, meaning that you, the audience, can interact with the story, can immerse yourself in the story, can affect the show. It’s a play that you play.

Nicole Darden Creston:
So there's a level of participation - is it expected from the audience? Or can you just observe?

Megan Markham:
You can definitely just observe, you can sit and kind of watch what's going on around you. Our show takes place in the lobby of Fringe ArtSpace and also in the black box. So if you just set up camp and sit somewhere, you might miss a few things, because there are things going on in multiple places at the same time. But an actor might come up to you and just say hello, try to chat. It's themed as a party. And it really has the environment of a party. So whether you're talking to another audience member that showed up with you, or you are finding out more about the story and about the club, it's like ‘just having conversations with people’ level of interaction. And if you're not comfortable talking to people, you can just kind of say like, Hey, I'm just observing. And we'll be like, cool. You do you.

Nicole Darden Creston:
So, no pressure.

Megan Markham:
Yeah, absolutely. We try to make it really easy for you to get a variety of experiences depending on what you come in with. But if you come in, fully in, like in character, you're playing this like it's an RPG, and you're going to be a detective solving everything, we will also go with that and let you fully become part of the story if you want to be.

Nicole Darden Creston:
That sounds like so much fun. How long have you been doing these interactive, immersive theatrical pieces?

Megan Markham:
We started doing murder mysteries in 2016, I want to say, and we've done at this point, a dozen murder mysteries that are interactive shows that have this format. But then we also do immersive theater, year-round in other mediums. We do immersive theater online, we do these interactive Zoom shows, which sounds like it's not going to be fun. (laughter) But I promise, it's way more exciting than a meeting with your coworkers on Zoom, where you fully investigate the story and you become part of the environment. We've been doing it eight years. Now we also do immersive audio dramas where you walk around outside and put on headphones and listen to a story. While there are actors in front of you acting out what is happening in your headphones. We do a lot of different things. But they all kind of fall under the umbrella of immersive and usually interactive.

Nicole Darden Creston:
Is there a favorite story that you have or a surprising circumstance that evolved from one of these theatrical performances?

Megan Markham:
Well, I've got so many because I've been doing stuff with this company since we started in 2010. Before it was even called Phoenix Tears. And before we were doing immersive stuff. So I've been doing this since I was literally a teenager. And one of the things that has surprised me is the fact that we've gone into the immersive and interactive and experimental realm at all because we started doing shows about fantasy worlds. We did like different shows and parodies based on things like the Wizard of Oz and Harry Potter and things like that. So that we've gone into this is really exciting and really where my life's passion is so it's how I've continued to work here for as long as I have. But as far as individual experience stories, we had a murder mystery several years ago where someone came super in-character. It was 50s themed and they fully dressed in like vintage 50s clothing, and they brought like a full bag full of props and things that they thought they might need to use and by the end did the show, there was an audience member holding a clue that they were like, “I think it's this person because of this clue.” And we all looked at it and we had not written it! It was not by us! It was not part of the show. It was this person who had come super in-character had written a threatening note, as the character they were in…everyone just thought she was part of the show. We totally rolled with it, it's totally fine. That is above and beyond what we expect an audience member to do. But it was really funny, and also absolutely incredible that someone could get that excited about the show we're putting on that they're forging evidence!

Nicole Darden Creston:
That is great. Now, you said that the style of immersive and interactive theater is your passion. Why?

Megan Markham:
I just think that experimental and new works are the way of the future. I love traditional theater as much as the next person. My cat is literally named after Gavroche in Les Miserables. But I don't think that's the future. I don't want every theater to just be doing the same show that everyone has done since the dawn of time. But I also understand that it's really hard to get people excited about new traditional theater, like, how good is it going to be? It's just by Joe Schmo down the road, and I could go see a Lin Manuel Miranda show - what am I going to choose? And so when thinking about what kind of theater I want to experience that I'm okay going into it knowing nothing about it and still think I'm going to have a good time. For me it's stuff that's participatory. I love escape rooms. I love immersive art installations. I love going to parties that have a little bit of like a quirky theme. And this kind of combines all of that into theater. I also love writing and creating stories and devising pieces. I think actors are absolutely brilliant. And that even if an actor doesn't know that they can write and doesn't consider themselves a creative person. I love seeing them devise and create a character that they can play throughout the night. And so it's really exciting to see what kind of stories not only the actors and the writers put together, but that the audience puts together as well. And in Bleeding Hearts Club, the show that we're talking about, what the audience does impacts the story. There are different potential killers and different potential victims. And depending on what the audience does, and what they get excited about and what they uncover, the story changes. And I just think that's so cool. Like, that's what brings me so much joy, is finishing the show and talking with everyone and being like, “it's because you did this thing and this thing that we got to this ending - isn't that so cool? Isn't that so neat?”

Nicole came to Central Florida to attend Rollins College and started working for Orlando’s ABC News Radio affiliate shortly after graduation. She joined WMFE in 2010. As a field reporter, news anchor and radio show host in the City Beautiful, she has covered everything from local arts to national elections, from extraordinary hurricanes to historic space flights, from the people and procedures of Florida’s justice system to the changing face of the state’s economy.
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