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Urban Death

Reviewed by Jessica Salans

Zombie Joe’s Underground

Through May 16

RECOMMENDED:

Imagine a moving museum of performance vignettes. No words, just actions. Set to music, three to 30 seconds in length, placed on a bare black box stage, set inches from a crammed-tight audience. The audience startles and cranes their heads with each new scene. All this elicits gasps and applause, filling the small theater with an electricity that permeates each blackout scene.

I should also mention the overtly sexual nature of the show, in which all ensemble members are frequently undressed and swathed in gaunt makeup. They are all zombies in this museum of gothic darkness.

If you can stomach images such as a half naked woman being whipped by a grinning clown, or a man with pulsating back-zits which are popped by doctors who then eat the ooze, you will also discover other, more subtle and moving vignettes throughout the evening. There is a haunting, beautiful waltz of death where a woman is a rag doll to her sweeping partner. There is a jarring story of an urban mother, doling applesauce into the mouth of her child, who is in some kind of vegetative state. We see the mother’s grief manifest itself in a terrorizing act of murder.

The show’s ensemble is intensely committed to each movement. Some scenes feature one cast member, others two, and in other scenes every cast member is on stage — grasping outward in gape-mouthed zombie glare, terrifying the audience members they are locking eyes with. The cast is relentless and devoted to meeting the daunting emotional and physical demands of the roles.

There’s nothing else like it in Los Angeles. The audience expresses its disgust, surprise and enjoyment of this ZJU staple of 14 years.

Zombie Joe’s Underground; 4850 Lankershim Blvd, N. Hlywd.; Sat., 11 p.m.; through May 16. https://www.urbandeath.com/