LIBRARIANS HAVE NEVER BEEN SO DANGEROUS

INTERVIEW: BOB DEROSA

BY RYAN M. LUÉVANO

Bob DeRosa. Photo Credit: Blake Gardner Photography.

Writer Bob DeRosa (Killers, 2010; The Air I Breathe, 2007; and 20 Seconds to Live, 2015) is no stranger to writing exciting action-packed adventures, and now he brings his first play All The Best Killers Are Librarians to the stage at this year’s Hollywood Fringe Festival. The show originally premiered as an ongoing serial in Sacred Fools Theater’s late-night sensation “Serial Killers” where the audience crowned it winner of Season Ten. Now, DeRosa has combined all seven episodes into a fast-paced hour-long show that will be seen for the first time in its entirety at the Hollywood Fringe on the Sacred Fools Theater’s Second Stage. Here, Derosa discuss the genesis of his new play and what audiences can expect from this intriguing piece of theater.

How did you come up with the idea for All the Best Killers Are Librarians?

I love to write about assassins and people with amazing skills that are also trying to live normal lives. So I just had this idea about a librarian pulled into a world of adventure. I had not written anything for the tenth season of “Serial Killers” at Sacred Fools Theatre and I said, ‘Oh my God, it’s the tenth anniversary season, I have to write something’. I went back in my memory, and said, ‘What about that librarian idea?’ And the title All the Best Killers Are Librarians just popped into my head, and I said, ‘that’s a show!’

How would you best describe this show?

Jennifer Christina DeRosa and Lauren Van Kurin.

It’s an action-packed comedy with heart. It’s about a shy librarian that discovers that she’s an amazing killer when she’s recruited into a secret organization that hires and trains the best killers in the world. And she’s faced with a big decision: is she going to follow her gift? or is she going to just be a librarian? the thing that makes her happy—all of that with tons of laughs and huge, crazy fight scenes on stage.

What is the Sacred Fools Theatre “Serial Killer” series?

Five shows enter, three shows leave. Every week there’s five serialized shows and the audience votes and kills two of them, and the three surviving shows move on to the next week where they get to do another episode against two brand new shows who are trying to knock them out. It’s competitive theater. And at the end of the season they have playoff where they put the top sixteen shows against each other.

How is this Hollywood Fringe version compare to the original episodic work ?

Two things come to mind. When I write serialized form I try to find clever ways to recap what’s come before, so a brand new audience can come and see episode five, and not be lost. So the first thing was to go through the script and pull that stuff out, and I wasn’t as simple as ‘I’m going to cut out this page’, it was that I had bits of dialogue and I had little moments that I realized ‘oh that’s recap stuff’ so figuring out where I’d hidden all that stuff and pulling it out so the show didn’t feel repetitive when we’re watching it as a straight hour long.

There’s also so many fights. We have our award wining fight choreographer Mike Mahaffey, he’s a professional, that’s what he does, and every episode in the original show he would create a fight scene, which is cool, until you put the show together and realize, ‘Oh there twelve fights.’ And our lead actress Lauren Van Kurin, who plays Margo the show’s librarian, is in every one of them, so this poor girls is fighting the entire time, then stopping to have a funny scene, then an emotional scene and then another fight. So I had to go through and pick and choose the fights that really told the story and that escalated so it didn’t get repetitive.

How did you decide to transform this piece into a single work and bring it to the 2016 Hollywood Fringe Festival?

My wife Jen was in the show, she played the evil librarian, Eleanor, and we had a blast working together and we both loved the show. Then one day when we were on a long drive and we were talking about last year, I remember saying, ‘The most joy I had of anything I did was working on this show.’ And she said, ‘How about doing it for the Hollywood Fringe?’ to which I said, ‘Oh my gosh, it looks like we’re producing a show.’ So we decided to take the individual episodes and make a full length show out of it, and Jen’s reprising her role as well as producing the show. We even got back our original director Alicia Conway Rock, who’s amazing, and a lot of the original cast was able to come with us too. So we’re remounting it as an hour-long extravaganza.

(L to R): Alicia Conway Rock, Mike Mahaffey, Lauren Van Kurin, Jennifer Christina DeRosa, and Bob DeRosa.

How has Alicia Conway Rock’s direction shaped this work in the original and now in the most recent version?

“Serial Killers” is a great exercise for everybody; it’s great for the writers, for actors, for directors because you have no time to work. You win a week, and then a week later you need a whole ten-minute show ready to go. This time she’s got the opportunity to dig deeper and to do all that really cool directing work that you don’t have time to do in “Serial Killers”. There’s time to sit down and talk to your actors and do the proper table work, to go through all the characters and their arcs, you go deep into their history, who they are, define all the really cool hidden moments in the script. Now for the first time I’m getting to see her process, the way she thinks, the way she inspires and motivates the actors to dig deeper and give really good performances.

What are your favorite moments in the show?

My wife is so sweet, so giving and people just love her, but to see her play a character that’s really bad, just deliciously bad, and to see her do these crazy fight scenes is just a dream. I also enjoy the fact that it’s a really funny show, but it’s also heartbreaking. Every character wants something really badly and not everybody is going to get what they want. I’m a big fan of a big comedy show, but I can’t write anything that doesn’t have an emotional poignancy to it. So every character gets an emotional moment when their story comes full circle and not everyone makes it out of the show alive. And being able to see those emotions played out in the midst of a crazy fight skilled show, that’s the thing I’m just so proud of in this show.

What can audiences expect from this show?

They can expect a really good time. It’s going to be really funny, really fast—I think they are going to be amazed by the fights—I think they’re going to be amazed at how surprising the fights are. They’re going to see the first fight and say, ‘That was pretty cool’, and then they’ll see the next fight and say, ‘Oh my gosh, they took it up another level’—and another level, and another level. And when all of that is said and done they’re going to feel something, they’re going to walk out and have an emotional reaction. This show is everything I like to do in my writing packed on the stage with seven people working their asses off—it’s going to be a smorgasbord, everything they could want from a theatrical experience.

If you like action, comedy and heart, then put All The Best Killers Are Librarians on your 2016 Hollywood Fringe Festival must see list.

LOCATION: Sacred Fools Theater (Second Stage) 6320 Santa Monica Blvd

PERFORMANCE DATES:

June 5th 8 pm (preview)
Friday June 10th 8:30 pm
Wednesday June 15th 10:30 pm
Saturday June 18th 4 pm
Saturday June 25th 3:30 pm

For more information and tickets visit: www.hollywoodfringe.org