In 1979, a Philadelphia-set horror movie called The Queen in Purple premiered at the TLA.

While marketed as Philly's answer to Saturday Night Fever, the film put a macabre twist on the disco formula in the figure of The Purple Queen, a seductive specter with a mysterious agenda who appeared to the characters and challenged them to dance for their lives.

Controversial at the time for its protagonist, a cross-dressing Italian-American mayor who couldn't help but remind viewers of Frank Rizzo, the film became the stuff of legend after the audience left the theater during the final scene and started rioting up and down South Street.

The situation was made more bizarre by the fact that all of the film's principal creators either died or vanished in the weeks following the riots. What’s more, the inciting last scene was thought to be lost, its reel possibly destroyed in the violence.

Forty-five years later, three individuals with ties to these tragic events are struggling to make sense of what happened.

...A Temple professor attempting to write a biography of the film's late director, Barbara Blumenthal, who dropped dead in New York several days after the premiere.

...The son of Rodney Mackie, lead singer of The Freedom Riders, the West Philly soul band that performed the soundtrack, who perished in a plane crash over the Pine Barrens while trying to leave town.

...And a mysterious South Philly trash man named Dick Pesto, who played the lead role but has since disappeared.

Through a combination of spoken-word performances and original music, the show will channel the memories of these lost Philadelphians as they wade into the depths of an unresolved local mystery.