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Meet ‘Last Night of Ballyhoo’ actor John Repa

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John Repa 01The 1997 Tony Award-winning comedy/drama The Last Night of Ballyhoo opens at the Laboratory Theater of Florida on April 14. Among the show’s talented cast is John Repa.

John Repa is an actor, comedian, playwright and more recently, an author of a zombie apocalypse novel titled Blood Creek Eulogy (available on Kindle), which is told from the viewpoint of the zombies!

Many Southwest Florida residents and visitors have seen him perform at The Lab and, among other venues, Florida Rep, Theatre Conspiracy and on the Seminole Gulf Railway Murder Mystery Dinner Last Night 20Train. He has also performed in Chicago and Seattle. Earlier this season, he played political candidate William Russell in Gore Vidal’s The Best Man. Before that, he was Sir Toby Belch for Lab Theater in last season’s production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

As a playwright, John has written a two-man show called Biblically Speaking. As a member of the Theatre Conspiracy Playwriting Group, he penned a full-length John Repa 03play in 2014 called Harker’s Journal, a take-off on Bram Stoker’s Dracula in which Harker’s wife, Mina, must consider the possibility that her husband has gone mad after she receives and reads the journal he wrote during his recent trip to Transylvania. John wrote his first script in grade school when he found out that a group book report could be done as a staged scene – but his group had read Jack London’s White Fang. He went on from there to study playwriting at SIU at Carbondale and Columbia College Chicago, where he graduated in 1990.

Because John started out as stage crew member and scenic designer, he has a very practical approach to staging. Having worked extensively as Dance 01an actor, he has a strong sense of what an actor can do onstage to captivate an audience. He seeks to combine thoughtful theater with a quirky sense of humor that provides heartfelt laughs during a performance and something deeper to think about later.

March 31, 2017.

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