No one stalked the indie stage with more éclat in 2005 than Bob Malos, who utilized his imposing frame and sonorous voice to provide characters who were tortured by their own greatness and dogged by the Reaper's impending embrace. In May he starred as Capt. Larsen in Hardcover Theater's adaptation of Jack London's The Sea Wolf, and captured a scary sense of nihilistic menace and intellectual savagery that shivered numerous timbers in the audience. Come July he stalked the stage in Girl Friday Productions' excellent An Empty Plate at the Café du Grand Boeuf, mixing humor and despair in his portrayal of a wealthy, death-obsessed cynic. Then a month later, he appeared in the Fringe as doomed James Garfield in The President, Once Removed. In all three performances, Malos radiated a sense of bittersweet awareness combined with a thoughtful recognition of his characters' power and the different ways it could be applied. At times humanitarian and at others downright Nietzschean (not that there's an inherent dichotomy), Malos delivers dark clouds interspersed with dingy sunlight.