VALLEY WEEKEND : THEATER REVIEW : Play Offers Loud, Violent View of Hack Writer’s World : Two Roads Theatre’s production of ‘Killers’ keeps the audience nervously off-balance.

If fans of John Olive think they know him based on his thoughtful, even quaint play “The Voice of the Prairie,” well, they don’t know him at all.

Olive has written many more plays than “Voice,” but because of the often timid programming of L.A. theaters, his other works are essentially invisible around here. Now that Olive’s “Killers” is on view at Two Roads Theatre, it’s clear what theaters have been timid about.

“Killers” is loud, nasty, messy, devious, violent, absurd and funny. It requires an infinitely more skilled staging than the one devised by director Joe Fiske, but the play’s unnerving view of a hack novelist’s creative process is still decipherable.

Olive calls his novelist hero Blackwell (Steve Sisk), but pulp fiction aficionados know better. Blackwell is typing out a tome titled “The Killer Inside Me,” which happens to be the title of a stunning, savage book by Jim Thompson. Is “Killers” the author’s shrouded portrait of Thompson?

Could be, but “Killers” keeps you nervously off-balance, so you can never be sure. Olive toys with our perceptions, suggesting that the other people in the inner-city boardinghouse in which Blackwell is writing are actually Blackwell’s characters. They include Lou (Fiske), a deranged, penniless young guy who sniffs other people like a dog; Landlady (Lisa Cole), who seems more like a prisoner here than the owner; her husband (called simply “Husband” and played by George Duran), who has returned to his wife to abuse her; and Earl (A. Don Altman), a sedentary old guy who always seems to be in the way.

Lou’s hyper behavior smells like trouble from the beginning, so it’s no surprise when he gets into bloodier and bloodier tussles with Blackwell and Husband. Everybody irritates everybody else: Earl says that Blackwell’s typing is like gun shots, while Blackwell’s room is constantly invaded by people.

And not people, really, but animals. Blackwell is the only one here who seems to have a room; he’s surrounded by neighbors pacing hallways, running outside naked, on the verge of breakdowns and homicides. Yet Blackwell attacks his typewriter so that no carpal tunnel syndrome therapy would ever be a cure. He’s willing a book into existence, even if it depends on murder to get it done.

Fiske’s actors keep up a strong, physical pace that almost borders on delirium, but Fiske’s stage conception doesn’t maintain the feverishness of Olive’s writing. The uncredited set (and props) are all red, but that’s as far as a stylish stage view of a madhouse goes.

Sisk delivers the sweaty, stressed goods as Blackwell, but Fiske is sometimes out of control as maniacal Lou, and Cole doesn’t find the needed level of reality inside her surreal role. Duran is always scary, but Altman could be much funnier in his bit as spectator.

*

Killers: Two Roads Theatre, 4348 Tujunga Ave., Studio City. Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m. Ends Saturday. $8. (213) 461-2423.