Trapped in a Room with a Zombie, located in the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue, is perhaps the only corporate-bonding experience that forces you and your coworkers to face the ultimate question: Will you escape in time, or will you be eaten?

A part of the Room Escape Adventures series, Trapped in a Room with a Zombie is a 60-minute interactive theater experience in which groups—mostly of coworkers, although also, as one Yelp reviewer suggests, of friends, family, even couples—attempt to escape a ravenous zombie who is chained to a wall. Veering more towards comedy than horror, the exercise requires participants to work together to find clues and solve riddles—or risk being eaten. More succinctly, Bucket List Productions Founder and Trapped in a Room Creator Marty Parker summarizes: “You [pay] money to lock yourself in a room with a hungry zombie.”

Photo courtesy of Room Escape Adventures.

A former professional mascot who worked his way up the ladder from Ohio University to the San Francisco Giants, Parker founded Bucket List Productions in 2007 as a conduit for and generator of motivational and corporate workshops. In the past, the company has put on Mud Ninja (its version of a warrior dash), the Color Palooza (a color run) and other “mob events.”Parker describes participants in Trapped in a Room as “running around like Starbucks on fire”—a phrase that could also be used to describe the way Parker himself thinks, switching rapidly from any one of “four thoughts” at any given time. Room Escape Adventures is his brainchild, the current iteration of his desire to “inspire people to live passionate lives.” While currently Trapped in a Room with a Zombie and its sequel, Still Hungry, are the company’s central productions, Parker reports that others are in the works.

But recently, Parker found himself wanting to bring his love for the improvisational and interactive, two skills he’d relied on as a mascot, to his events. With Room Escape Productions, he believes he’s seamlessly tied the theatrical with the corporate—and created an immersive experience to boot. Today, participants can seek out these experiences in 19 cities worldwide.

“They’re really with us when they’re with us,” Parker said of participants. “They’re not thinking about what they’ve got to buy for groceries, they’re not thinking about kids; they’re not thinking about work.” After all, it’s pretty hard to think of anything else when there’s that darn zombie coming after you.