‘BORDERLINE’ PUTS ITS AUTHOR’S PAST ON STAGE

John Bishop has double murder on his mind. It’s been there since he was 8 and witnessed such an act in his tranquil Ohio neighborhood. He touched on the subject in his last play, “Harvesting.”

Now, he’s writing about it again in “Borderline,” a taut one-act about a man’s emotional disintegration (at the Skylight Theatre through Feb. 16).

“I guess something like that does hang on,” noted the 54-year-old New Yorker, briefly in town to check--and offer a few rewrites--on the production’s recent reopening (prompted by glowing critical reception, and six Drama-Logue Awards, when it was launched last fall).

“I was thinking, what would be the effect if I looked out my window and saw somebody get blown away? Then, because I work a lot with companies that have marketing men, I thought, what if it’s one of them (who does it)? What would murder do to someone who said, ‘I don’t have any passion in my life. Why don’t I care?’ ”

Bishop’s lead character is Charles Graham--played by Cotter Smith--”a brilliant guy, who comes from a family with a violent heritage (a historical examination of his ancestral tree is presented by a chalk-wielding lecturer), who does no self-examination--who is, in fact, a bit of a quitter. And when it all crumbles, he doesn’t know where to turn. So he turns to sex.

“He (the character) interested me,” Bishop continued, “and he’s part of me. A lot of me is in him--a lot that I don’t like, or haven’t liked, is in him. Certainly the violence: the tendency toward it when I was younger. And some of his attitudes toward women: what he thought he needed from women, from life.

“Sometimes you can’t really tell who’s you and who’s your character. The actor makes it all one person, but in any play you could pull out one (key) speech and that’s that playwright. Of course, the trick is not to let the audience know that.”

In spite of the occasional discomfort it may cause, Bishop’s writing is not just about himself.

“I figured that was what you had to do, and I found out from my first play that people didn’t recognize themselves in the work. So I’ve used elements of my ex-wife, a friend from L.A. And Sybil (Rosen, the woman he lives with) was in this play a little.

“You really do have to expose yourself or you’re not going to be a very interesting writer,” he insisted.

“I’m at the point now with close friends, where if they don’t know something about me, I’m surprised. Once I was having an argument with Sybil and I said, ‘How could you not know that? Didn’t you see the play?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I know that about you. I just didn’t want to deal with it.’ ”

Bishop chuckles. It’s been 10 years since he assessed his career--as a director of industrial shows--”and realized I was really sick of what I was doing. Because I’d started out (at Carnegie-Mellon as a drama major) in serious theater, and I missed it. A friend of mine began a tiny theater company over a carpet store in New York and asked me to direct. He said, ‘Do that (other stuff) for a living; this is for your soul.’ ”

Soon after, he decided to take a stab at stage writing. His first play, “The Trip Back Down,” was produced on Broadway in 1977 (and the movie rights bought by Columbia, though it was never made).

These days, Bishop divides his time and energies between dramaturgist duties at New York’s prestigious Circle Repertory Company, a six-month stint as writer-in-residence at Oklahoma’s Central State University and the new play he’s writing, “The Musical Comedy of Murders in 1940.”

Occasionally, Hollywood calls. But although he admits a weakness for the California climate, television and movies may not be his game.

“I don’t think I’m a good enough writer to do that,” he said thoughtfully. “I can only write out of me, not someone else.”