A series of unannounced public performance provocations was a prelude to the Holy Bone performance. In this sense, it doesn’t matter if anyone notices the Holy Bone performers—or “Boners,” as Riccio refers to them. These performers share something with the shamanistic figures that inspired them insofar as they are not so much meant to be characters as symbolic actors, and their actions point our awareness beyond our experience of the physical world toward the suggestion of some metaphysical other. You might encounter them; you might not. You might have already encountered them without even knowing it. Their work is meant to pass in and out of notice, disrupting everyday Dallas life and casting doubt on our otherwise thoughtless day-to-day experiences. Holy Bone is a warning or maybe a prophecy.

—D Magazine

At a Dead White Zombies show, rules do not apply. Known for its site-specific performance installations, staged everywhere from warehouses to a former stash house. The original scripts are fluid and not confined to any one playing space; audiences are often left to wander in and out of the action, which can span rooms and even into the outdoors.

—Arts and Culture Texas

Writer/director Thomas Riccio and his folk avant-garde theater company, Dead White Zombies (DWZ), assault this thirst for faster and bigger development head-on. Their self-generated, immersive production, Bull Game (winner loses action figures), puts on display the last, dying gasp of Western Civilization.

—Theatre Jones

Subtitling a play about a dystopian competition where the winner is allowed to procreate and save the human race while the loser is ritualistically slid beneath a circular saw, “winner loses action figures” is either trivial or incredibly apropos. In Bull Game, Dead White Zombies’ latest immersive and interactive show, the stakes are high but the delivery is grounded. This is a show that lampoons professional sports, male posturing, and our own predictable crowd reactions while giving a sly wink.

—D Magazine

This past weekend, I was a part of the most electrifying and brutal theater performances of my theater-going life. It was all thanks to a group called Dead White Zombies. The performance I lived was an immersion piece staged in an abandoned crack house in Dallas. And it defies all the words. I have spent the last three days desperately searching for ways to describe it.

—K102 FM Radio

Dead White Zombies might amaze or enrage you with its immersive production of T.N.B. Either way, chalk one up for a theater that's shaking things up. It's epic, cinematic, and gut-wrenching.

—Theatre Jones

Riccio puts the pedagogy of mythology and anthropology right on the line of Dallas culture, blending the city's politics, pastimes, and social structures with the cosmology of classical paganism (Homer, Virgil, Ovid) and a variety of shamanistic traditions, both ancient and contemporary.

The Zombies performance titled T.N.B., was staged in a former drug stash house in West Dallas. Thug life, in this piece, was treated as a point of mystery where forces of empathy and evil performed their cosmic dance. The show was, by turns, shocking, mysterious, and beautiful. I was amazed by it. The Zombies followed up with Bull Game–not as brilliant as T.N.B. but still bold and intelligent. Bull Game linked the contagious quality of anger, the prodigious enthusiasm of Dallas sports fans, and polytheistic rites of sacrifice and fecundity.

-GlassTire Texas

Taken apart, as in autopsy, it strains and fragments, laments, and groans, and lashes out with sexual angst and sweaty frustration. Screens scatter randomly throughout the candle-lit landscape, showing 1960s home movie family holiday clips over and over, backward and forwards, excerpts from a Fred Astaire dancing extravaganza, and unrecognizable black and white action films. Scenes ebb and flow as the audience floats, adrift, overwhelmed by images and sound. Sensate, intemperate immersion. Oddly enough, “w(hole)” weaves together with satisfying symphonic grace. Emerge refreshed, cleansed, jubilant.

—Dallas Examiner

Scenes spark around us like a long tail of igniting firecrackers. Another room is illuminated. Next, a vignette. Soon, all are available for exploration. The twisting paths feel like the unfathomable tunneling of memory storage, but the lives we're moving through are not our own. Even the sound, anchored scene by scene, bleeds gently into the next. We're fumbling into another's databank, threading together the experiences as we travel.

—Dallas Observer