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Making it Believable : The Theatrical World of Faye Armon-Trincoso '95
The interior was white. The couch was white. Even the actress wore white. Then she was shot and there was red, as she lay in a pool of blood.
The next day, the audience of the play “Stunning” saw the perfectly white set with no residue of bloodstains, until again, the actress was shot and the cycle continued day after day at the Duke Theatre in New York.
The blood was actually a flexible resin and paint combination created by prop designer Faye ArmonTroncoso ’95. Making non-messy blood is part of what the Radford University theatre alumna does now in her job. She creates effects that are manageable and believable onstage. This includes providing any object or furniture for a play that an actor touches during the course of the show. Much like an unseen magician, Armon-Troncoso is responsible for creating a suspension of disbelief and much of this magic happens on Broadway.
With this desire, the theatre allowed her to try her hand at props and she found the challenges interesting. Soon she was designing and creating props for off-Broadway.
This is where her story takes off. She did props for a show called “Bugs” at the Barrow Street Theatre. In this, the main character rages war on insects.
“I got all these repellents, gallon jugs and chemicals and made everything look like if a match were lit in this room, it would blow up,” she said. And eventually in the show, the room did explode.
For this work in 2004, she was the first person to win an Off-Broadway Theater Award (Obie) for props. Since then, only one other person has won an Obie for props.
This fueled her desire to stay in the business and start her own studio. She has since branched out with production design to film and television, including “The Tums Quarter-time Show” that ran during the 2017 Super Bowl on the internet.
For Armon-Troncoso, it is all about making the artificial believable. ■
