Bob Laine is a poet, playwright and actor.

 

He obtained his MFA from Eastern Michigan University where he was a member of  the national championship forensics team two years running and a five time national finalist, winning second in the nation in After Dinner speaking in 1987. He moved to Chicago in the early 90's where he, along with many of his fellow competitors from forensics, became members of the newly formed Warm Body Theater company. That company created and performed three original shows under the title Every Speck of Dust That  Falls To Earth Really Does Make The Whole Planet Heavier before dissolving and morphing into the Spin Half Performance Conflux, and morphing again into The Other Half. He performed his original material with all these companies as well as on the early Poetry Slam circuit  making the Chicago National Poetry Slam team in 1995. That same year he won Chicago's first ever video slam with a Dan Daley produced video of his poem Big Enough.  

 

Soon after he moved to New York and assimilated into the beautiful downtown independent theater community that was forming on the Lower East Side. There were no less than six theaters in a four block radius around Ludlow street where theater magic and future theater stars were being made. His first work was as the greeter and tech board operator for Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind at the infamous Toda Con Nada. That is where he met the PT Barnum of downtown theater, Aaron Beall, who ran Todo Con Nada as well as The Piano Store and The House of Candles. Aaron not only produced his first play What's That Buzz?,  but also introduced him to the great American verse playwright Kirk Wood Bromley. Soon he was cast in a double bill of Love's Labours Lost and Bromley's sequel Life's Losses Loved. Those shows led to the formation of Inverse Theater Company dedicated to performing Bromley's work and for the next decade he would  appear in over 20 of Bromley's original American verse plays including Midnight Brainwash Revival, American Revolution, Icarus and Aria, Want’s Unwisht Work , On the Origin of Darwin, The Banger’s Flopera, Three Dollar Bill,  The Death of Griffin Hunter and Me the Musical.  Inverse Theater Company was named "the best downtown theater company" in 2001 by the New York Press and was the first recipient of the New York Innovative Theater Awards Caffe Cino  award in 2005.

 

When he was not doing Inverse shows or performing his own material he found time to perform for another downtown legend: Frank Cwiklic  and his company DM Theatrics. He performed  in their hits Plan Nine From Outer Space and Two Gentlemen of Lebowksi after having performed in Bitch MacBeth in 2008, Who In the Hell is the Real Live Lorilie Lee? in 2004, their OOBR winning Antony and Cleopatra in 2002 and Fugitive Girls in 2000.

 

Eventually, like the Ludlow theater scene itself, both companies came to an end. He would find many new theater homes over the years including the Kraine Theater, La Mama, Here Theater, Under St Marks and the spiritual successor of Toda Con Nada, The Brick Theater in Williamsburg Brooklyn. Here he would act with a variety of groups including Gemini Collision Works who cast him as the Dandy Fop in the Richard Foreman play George Batille’s Bathrobe for which the New York Times called him “a comic gem." A few years later he would win an Innovative Theater Award for the company's production of Brian Park's The Golfer. Other favorite theater companies include Tux and Tom Productions which produced the shows The Moose that Roared and Elevator, and Loup Garou Theater company run by Inverse Alum Timothy McCown Reynolds who gave him the dream role of Clintandre in Reynolds’s play Le Lyncathrope, as well as casting him as Polunius in Hamlet. Recently he was given another dream role in Theater of the Apes production of Lunchtime written and directed by Greg Kotis , Tony Award winning writer of Urinetown.

 

In between acting with other companies, he has produced his own work including the aforementioned What's That Buzz? (Toda Con Nada/Piano Store), Cocaine Faggot (Here theater NBC solo series), The Books of the Boble (Kraine Theater Storytelling Festival) and most recently Ruth, An Apology in the Brick Theater's Lying Festival, as well as performing in various cabarets (Mel Delancey's Overshare Caberet) and Salons (Title:Points Monthly Salon) around town.

​

Though primarily a stage actor he has found himself in front of the camera on a handful of occasions for films such as Clown Town, How People Do, The Battle of Pussy Willow Creek (voiceover) The Moose Head Over the Mantle and most recently Blood Daughter and Keep Me Where the Light Is.

​

Post Pandemic he stumbled onto playwright Matthew Gasda and was featured in Matthew's hit underground plays Dimes Square and Minotaur which were spotlighted in the April 3rd 2022 New York Times. He also finished his own new play, Inventions and hopes to premiere that in 2023. 

​

Currently you can see him in the long running monthly live on-stage soap opera created by Roger Nassar, It's Getting Tired Mildred.