Cannibals, produced by Lisa Pescia, opens April 17; plays Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 7; through May 23. Tickets: $20. Zephyr Theatre, 7456 Melrose Ave., Hollywood; 323.960.7745 or plays411.com/cannibals.

So I head over to the Zephyr Theatre, known for housing new works, to interview R.J. (Bob) Colleary whose play Cannibals, directed by Kathleen Rubin, is the current tenant. This world premiere opens on April 17. The play is in tech rehearsal and after quick hellos in the darkened theater, we adjourn to a lobby area to sit and talk. The play’s producer, Lisa Pescia, joins us. Bob Colleary has an open, Irish face and an affable way about him. Did I mention a quick mind? He could be your landscaper or your English Lit teacher.

Bob Colleary

Colleary was a television writer for 30 years, which is hard to believe because he’s so young looking. Turns out, his father R.J. was the head writer on the original Captain Kangaroo Show and in 1980 won an Emmy for writing Barney Miller. Colleary’s brother is a writer as well and his sister is married to a writer. You might say it’s all in the family.

The children grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey and his father commuted to NY to work on Captain Kangaroo, Colleary remembers. “His friends were bankers and stock brokers. It wasn’t exactly the Hollywood family business template. Television was a new thing so people didn’t really understand what it was my father did for a living.”

There wasn’t much connection to live theater. He says, “My mother took me to see Our Town at The Whole Theater Company in Montclair, New Jersey, when I was 12. It hooked me. The actors and the audience were doing it together. The actors are with you. There’s an emotional connection. You don’t get that in television. In theater, there’s no net. In television, it’s all net. When I get an idea about something to write, it feels like a television pilot. When it’s something that has personal meaning to me, I want to put it onstage.”

Colleary attended Emerson College in Boston and majored in communications. There were no courses in television writing in those days. He didn’t finish college. “I ran out of things that interested me,” he recalls. “And, as The Rolling Stones song goes, ‘I’m gonna walk before they make me run.’ I was the oldest at not knowing what I wanted to do and the youngest at actually doing what I wound up doing, writing for television.”

His father moved the family out to Los Angeles while Colleary was still at Emerson. Reinhold Weege (Night Court) came over to their house the day after his dad won the Emmy and said to Colleary, “I hope some of this rubs off on you.” He hired Colleary to work on a new pilot. And thus, so the legend goes, the begetting of the writing career. He feels he was very lucky and fortunate in how his television career unfolded.

He describes it in a Harold Lloyd metaphor. “I felt like I was walking on a scaffold and stepped off the end of it and another one appeared, and then another, and they happened to be moving in an upward direction. In those days there were freelance writers. You pitched a story and you could book two or three assignments a year while you lived with your parents. It was the only way for freelancers to do it. Now, there’s no freelance market. Back then, the writers were 21 years old and the producers were 30.”

His play Cannibals was inspired while working on Touched by an Angel. “I went out to lunch with the other writers,” Colleary says. “About 10 feet away, there was this guy in his 60s, white hair in a ponytail, leatherjacket, cell phone on the table and he’s talking to a young woman in her 20s. I think he’s a writer pitching to a young exec. And I thought, I could never become that guy. This would never be me. It prompted me to save my money which was a good thing because I didn’t want to be hanging on in this business. Writer’s careers have an expiration date. There’s no security.”

Is it similar to the actresses in your play whose careers in Hollywood expire at 40?

“Yes,” he answers. “It brought up all these questions for me. For instance, when you stop being a moneymaking entity, what happens to you when ‘the business’ goes on without you? Who are you? A lot of people define who they are by what they do. When that’s gone, how do you navigate in the world? How do you stay productive? Cannibals follows a support group of actresses grappling with these and other questions.”

The play seems to be right on time, for a variety of reasons. There are more people than jobs, reality TV programming, the economy. Baby boomers are aging. Is this the first production?

“I’ve had a couple of staged readings and the response was terrific,” says Colleary.  “It was just big enough not to get done. It was always second on people’s list of things to do. At one point, Raquel Welch was attached. It’s funny how people out here get ‘unattached’ so quickly.”

Lisa Pescia

Lisa Pescia shares she met Colleary when, as an actress, she booked an episode of Touched by an Angel, written by…. yup, you guessed it. “After I shot the episode, I sent thank you notes to everyone involved, including Bob.”

He continues, “A couple of years ago, I was downsizing and while packing, my daughter Maggie found a note in a book. It was like a bookmark or something. It was the thank you note Lisa had sent me years before. I wondered what she was doing now. I looked her up online and saw she was producing shows at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. I wanted to know how to get a play done.”

“Oh,” she laughs, “so you knew I was producer! You set me up. We’ll talk about this later. A total manipulation!”

“It was networking!” he replies.

“Anyway,” she continues, “I read the script and thought it was too nasty. It bummed me out. It cut too close to the bone.”

“Not an unusual reaction,” he cuts in.

“I bought in anyway,” Pescia says. “Time passes. I sent it to an actress I knew. After she read it, she tells me, ‘I wouldn’t spend one day of my life working on this script.’ I start casting, which was a long process, and I tell Bob I was having a hard time with the casting.”

“I told her not to worry,” he says. “The right people would show up. So, here we are many years, 13 rewrites and three production teams later with the right people who showed up, ready for our close-up!”

How has the process been for you working on this play?

“Well, he answers, “in rehearsal, I want to help but I have to give up control to the actors and director. In television, directors work for you. You tell them what you want. It’s a more collaborative process in theater.”

“Yeah,” Pescia chimes in. “I told Bob, ‘Hey, look… I’m an actress. You’re talking about my artistic dream. It’s my life. Do I continue on or do I hang it up? Ya gotta give me something here!’”

“So, I’ve continued to work on the play to give it more balance and heart,” Colleary says. “It has a soft underbelly. The cast really infuses the work with their humanity. Lisa encouraged me to let the creative process unfold. No instant gratification. That it goes beyond getting the laugh. To let the actors do their work. And they have done that. They’ve personalized the writing. Now they move me as well as make me laugh.”

I ask Colleary what sustains him in his life. He says giving back to others fills him up. Giving of himself rather than, say, just donating to charities without getting involved. He mentors fifth graders for The Young Storytellers Foundation. Colleary is a baseball fan. So am I. We both agree writers from the east coast are funnier. We also agree the reason you can’t hear people scream in Hollywood is because they ride around in their cars with the windows rolled up.

Feature image of (bottom left to right) Robin Riker,  Ray Abruzzo, Brittany Ross (top left to right)  Caryn Richman,  Amy K. Murray,  Jackie Debatin,  Dale Dickey

Article by Camille Saviola