John Repa

John Repa is an actor, comedian, playwright and author.

Many Southwest Florida residents and visitors have seen him perform at Lab Theater, Florida Rep, Theatre Conspiracy at the Alliance for the Arts and on the Seminole Gulf Railway Murder Mystery Dinner Train. He has also performed in Chicago and Seattle. His local stage credits include The Last Night of Ballyhoo, political candidate William Russell in Gore Vidal’s The Best Man and Sir Toby Belch in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

As a playwright, John has written light comedy, children’s shows, and comedic murder mysteries, but most of his work is deeper and sometimes darker than it at first appears. His current e-book(s) Blood Creek Eulogy, is a zombie apocalypse novel told from the POV of the zombies. His other works include Two Boards and their Passion (consisting of our one-act lays requiring nothing more than two actors and a bare stage), Christmas Carol (a re-imagining of the Dickens novel that starts with the basic question of why and how has Scrooge been given a second chance at immortality) and Epilogue at Elsinore (which is a sequel to Hamlet or sorts). 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.

Because John started out as stage crew member and scenic designer, he has a very practical approach to staging. Having worked extensively as an 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.

John studied at SIU at Carbondale and graduated from Columbia College, Chicago in 1990.

March 9, 2021.