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In 2023, Jana Wimer and Robert Bullwinkel staged Vegas Theatre Company’s most successful run ever with Abandon, a terrifyingly taboo, R-rated horror experience that won the Weekly’s Best of Vegas award for Best Theater Shock.
“They took a risk on us,” says Bullwinkel, Abandon executive producer and co-writer with Wimer. “We walked into Daz [Weller’s] office and we had a little pitch deck. He bought the show on the pitch deck. That’s just the kind of spirit they have. They’re really willing to step outside of their comfort zone.”
The play, created through the duo’s production company Las Vegas Horror Show LLC, returned the following summer and over Halloween, whetting audiences’ appetite for immersive horror.
“There’s definitely an audience for what we’re doing,” Bullwinkel says. “Vegas has shown us that they are ready for this kind of sick, twisted and demented production.”
Let’s hope so, because their psychological horror production, Urban Death, will require some serious guts from the audience. Two decades ago, Wimer co-created the show in Hollywood with Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group. She has since directed versions of it in LA, Edinburgh, Cape Town, and now Las Vegas.
“I like to say that Urban Death was birthed from the darkness … because when I first saw a show with Zombie Joe’s, the first thing that struck me was the lights went out and it was pitch black. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face,” Wimer says. “You could just have anything in front of the audience, those lights come up and it’s a total surprise. They have no idea what they’re going to see.”
And therein lies the fun. Unlike Abandon, Urban Death features no character arcs or plot lines. It’s dialogue-less but no less provocative. The group creates vignettes, horror stories that play out onstage before the darkness snuffs them out. “We really partner with the audience’s imagination,” Wimer says. “We imply a lot and the imagination fills it in.”
Over the last 20 years, they’ve accumulated somewhere between 800-900 vignettes. And returning cast members from Abandon will bring them to life onstage. Bullwinkel says new pieces get added with each iteration of Urban Death, and the one at VTC will feature its own Vegas-centric horrors. But all those hair-raising moments come with humor, too.
“One of the most successful things about Urban Death is that you’ll be scared, you’ll be grossed out, you’ll be really scared, and then you laugh,” Bullwinkel says. “The laughter is like the Zamboni cleaning the ice. It refreshes your palate and makes you ready to be scared again.”
Bullwinkel suggests watching Urban Death on an empty stomach and with an open mind. It will challenge you. It will scare you. And it will also help you escape.
“We are living in probably the most terrifying time in the history of America, in the world,” Bullwinkel says. “This show gives us a little bit of catharsis that we can come together as a community, feel this together, cry, laugh, scream together. And we’ll leave feeling better about the world around us because of what we’ve seen.”
URBAN DEATH October 10-12, 17-20, 24-26, 31, November 1-2, 7:30 p.m., $25-$45. Vegas Theatre Company, theatre.vegas.
English (US) ·