He learned to do so in childhood, as his parents moved through four states by the time he was 11 because of his father’s job with U.P.S. He adjusted to new schools by strictly following rules, preferring to sit next to the other quiet kids, and he dove into acting lessons wherever he found them. He also had an entrepreneurial spirit: One Easter he asked for a water cooler as a gift because he wanted to be a businessman, and by high school he was designing Web sites for companies around Alpharetta, Ga., where his family finally settled.

After college he wrote the first draft of “Really Really” in the back of a passenger van while traveling the East Coast in a touring production of “Great Expectations.” And as an assistant company manager on the Broadway musical “Xanadu” he met its book writer, Douglas Carter Beane — an acquaintanceship that led to their collaboration on the “Cubby Bernstein” Web series (a spoof of the Tony Awards campaign season) and again on the musical “Sister Act.” Mr. Beane hired Mr. Colaizzo as his typist but eventually gave him a writing credit for churning out countless one-liners like “puttin’ the sis back in Genesis.”

“He’s a quick, instinctual writer who knows the way people talk, which you can’t teach,” said Mr. Beane, who has become a popular mentor for aspiring writers. “I wouldn’t have thought that someone who can write a real old-school joke like Paul could also write something like Neil LaBute on a bad day.”

Mr. Colaizzo’s networking also included sending an e-mail, cold, to the theater marketing firm Spotco and landing a four-month job, and later — crucially — asking friends at the Olney Theater Center in Maryland (where he had performed as Perchik in “Fiddler on the Roof”) to sponsor “Really Really” in a Washington play-reading festival.

The Signature Theater in Arlington, Va., ended up producing the premiere of “Really Really” last winter, and the reviews in The Washington Post and elsewhere were so strong that two New York producers reached out to Mr. Colaizzo about mounting the play on Broadway. He declined to go into the details but said he opted to have the play produced Off Broadway with an eye toward his long-term career interests.

“I’ve spent time learning different parts of the industry, and I want to be working in this industry for a while,” Mr. Colaizzo said. “To me MCC Theater is the right place right now for this play.”