Josh T. Ryan (AEA/AFTRA/SAG/SDC-Associate).

Josh T. Ryan

Josh T. Ryan is an American actor, director, producer, and performance practitioner whose career has encompassed experimental theatre, classical drama, independent film, television, and interdisciplinary performance. His work has developed largely within Los Angeles theatre, particularly through his long association with Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group and, later, the international theatre project RAZE THE SPACE.

Ryan’s artistic interests draw from a broad range of theatrical, literary, cinematic, musical, and multidisciplinary practices. Among the artists associated with his artistic development are Peter Brook, Antonin Artaud, Charles Bukowski, Anton Chekhov, Jerzy Grotowski, Michael Chekhov, Oliver de Sagazan, Harmony Korine, Werner Herzog, Kazuo Ohno, and Marina Abramović. His interests also extend to musicians and artists working across sound, film, visual art, movement, and performance. Among his artistic collaborators have been Arturo Castillo, Martin Jago, and Valorie Grear.

Rather than belonging to a single theatrical school, Ryan’s work reflects an intersection of classical text, physical comedy performance, experimental theatre, and actor-centered practice. His directing and performance work has frequently explored the relationship between the written text and the physical presence of the actor, with an emphasis on experimentation, transformation, and the possibilities of live performance.

ZJU

The most formative period of Ryan’s theatre career was his association with Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group (ZJU) in North Hollywood. From 1991 through 2017, he served as Co-Founding Associate Artistic Director, working alongside Zombie Joe in the development of the company and its productions.

ZJU became part of the distinctive underground theatre culture that developed in Los Angeles outside the larger institutional theatre companies. The company was known for experimental productions, intimate performance spaces, physical and unconventional approaches to theatre, and material that often challenged conventional theatrical expectations.

Ryan’s role within ZJU extended well beyond acting. He worked as a director, producer, performer, and collaborator, participating in the development of productions and in the company’s broader artistic activity. His work included both original and devised performance as well as unconventional interpretations of established dramatic texts.

A contemporary review of one of his productions described Ryan and the Zombie Joe company as able to “turn the play inside out,” a characterization that captures an important aspect of his directorial approach: the use of established texts as material for reinterpretation rather than as fixed theatrical forms.

His production of Othello also received recognition within the Los Angeles theatre community. Actor T. Arthur Cottam received an Artistic Director Achievement Award from the Valley Theatre League in 2002 for his work in Ryan’s production.

Ryan’s years with ZJU established a substantial body of experience in experimental theatre and contributed to a practice in which acting, directing, producing, and theatrical development were closely interconnected.

RAZE THE SPACE

Following his extensive work with Zombie Joe’s Underground, Ryan became associated with RAZE THE SPACE, the international theatre project founded by director, writer, and poet Martin Jago. Ryan served as an Associate Artistic Director and participated in the company’s productions and international theatre programs.

RAZE THE SPACE provided a different context for the experimental principles that had informed Ryan’s earlier work. The company developed new writing, international theatre, classical material, devised performance, physical theatre, and collaborative projects involving artists from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, and elsewhere.

Ryan’s work with RAZE included both acting and directing. In 2017 he appeared as the Guard in the company’s staged reading of Sophocles’ Antigone at the Mark Taper Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles, directed by Martin Jago.

He subsequently appeared as an actor in RAZE’s international programming, while also developing his work as a director. In 2015, Ryan directed Donna Latham’s Glacial Decline as part of RAZE THE SPACE’s “US & THEM” program at Samuel French in Hollywood.

In 2019, Ryan directed David MacGregor’s Incident on the Golden Gate Bridge for RAZE THE SPACE’s International Ten-Minute Play Festival at the Mark Taper Auditorium. Ryan received the festival’s Best Director award for the production.

The 2019 festival featured eight world-premiere plays selected from more than 600 international submissions, with the selected playwrights representing Australia, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Ryan’s involvement with RAZE also included the company’s larger international and classical theatre projects. His collaboration with Martin Jago extended to the development of Shakespearean work and to the company’s interest in bringing classical texts into contemporary performance environments.

The RAZE period therefore continued Ryan’s movement between acting and directing while placing his work within a broader international theatre network.

Directing and Performance

Ryan’s career as a director has developed alongside his work as an actor. He has directed both contemporary and classical material, with a particular interest in productions that allow the actor and the physical circumstances of performance to play an active role in shaping the work.

His approach is informed by a range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century performance traditions. The influence of Peter Brook, Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, and Michael Chekhov provides one context for understanding his interest in the actor’s physical presence, while artists such as Kazuo Ohno, Marina Abramović, Oliver de Sagazan, Werner Herzog, and Harmony Korine point toward a wider interest in performance, transformation, image, and unconventional forms.

Ryan’s influences are not limited to theatre. His artistic interests have also included writers, filmmakers, musicians, visual artists, and multidisciplinary performers. This broader field of influence has contributed to a practice that does not draw a strict boundary between theatre and other forms of performance.

Television and Popular Entertainment

Alongside his theatre career, Ryan has worked in television and popular entertainment. He created, executive produced, and starred in the Showtime unscripted series Lock N Load. Theatre biographies from the period also identify him as the creator, executive producer, and host of the program, as well as an award-winning stage actor and director and founding member of Zombie Joe’s Underground.

His television work represents another side of a career that has consistently moved between experimental performance and more commercially oriented forms of entertainment.

Ryan has also continued to work in independent film and theatre as an actor, director, producer, and performance coach. His theatre credits include work with actors and companies throughout the Los Angeles independent theatre community.

He is also listed by the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society as an Associate Member and director based in the Los Angeles area.

Artistic Practice

Ryan’s work has been shaped by the meeting of several traditions rather than by adherence to one particular methodology. His background in underground theatre placed him in an environment where experimentation and direct audience engagement were central concerns; his work with classical texts connected that experimentation to established dramatic literature; and his later international collaborations expanded those interests into new writing, devised theatre, and cross-cultural performance.

His artistic practice places particular value on the actor as an active participant in the creation of performance. Text, movement, voice, physical presence, space, and audience relationship can function not simply as elements of a finished production but as materials through which a performance develops.

This perspective helps explain the range of artists who have influenced him. Artaud and Grotowski represent radically different but related challenges to conventional theatrical practice; Brook’s work emphasizes the fundamental relationship between performer, space, and audience; the Chekhov tradition places imagination and physical expression at the center of character; while artists such as Ohno, Abramović, de Sagazan, Herzog, and Korine operate across performance, image, film, and physical transformation.

Ryan’s career consequently occupies an unusual position between underground theatre, classical performance, television, and interdisciplinary art.

Later Career

After an extended period of professional creative activity, Ryan stepped away from formal artistic leadership and sustained stage work for approximately a decade, spending much of that period outside the professional theatre and focusing on family and life beyond the industry.

The subsequent return to creative work has provided a different perspective on the practices that defined his earlier career. His experience encompasses more than three decades of involvement in Los Angeles experimental theatre, international theatre collaboration, television production, directing, acting, and performance development.

From his years helping to build Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group to his later work with RAZE THE SPACE, Ryan’s career has remained centered on the possibilities of performance outside narrowly defined categories.

His body of work reflects a continuing interest in the tension between classical and experimental theatre, literary text and physical action, actor and director, and established form and creative risk. Rather than belonging exclusively to either the mainstream or the avant-garde, Ryan’s career has moved between those worlds, using each to inform the other.

SUNSHINE

BUTTONHEADS.

WILT AWAY.

THE SALES KING

LOCK ‘N LOAD (SHOWTIME)

ASSOCIATE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR with RAZE THE SPACE INTERNATIONAL THEATRE PROJECT

“Padre” By Sally Davis. @ The Mark Taper Auditorium

DEEP BLACK SLUDGE

Josh T. Ryan’s One Man Show, reviewed again.

LA TIMES, Back Stage, LA WEEKLY, & Review Plays

The capacity crowd anxiously waited as the de rigueur five minute late curtain extended to ten minutes, and when the lights went black and the music began its loud throbbing, the crowd erupted with expectation. They were not disappointed. Josh T. Ryan appears doing a Fonz, slowly combing his hair; but not just combing the hair – loving – caressing – worshipping the hair with his comb as he moves from one part of the stage area to the other. Ordinarily a man combing his hair is no big deal.

But this is Josh T. Ryan, who’s so intense he can reduce anyone to tears just by reading the phone book. This is the Ryan of a thousand faces – of a plethora of expressions – of a million moves. To say that this is a one man show would be a gross understatement. It’s more like a show of dozens of men with one man doing all the parts. So when Josh combs his hair there is an uncommon artistry and expression, and a deconstruction of the action that lets the audience explore the minute intricacies of one of the most common acts, and gives us an inside glimpse of puffery and arrogance at their best.

The only connection (that we know of) between the seventeen tabloids offered, is that the audience howls with laughter every time. Other than that, the Colonel Saito from the Bridge on The River Kwai, is just as compelling and comic as the Chicken Boy, or the rude Irish lad who can’t pronounce “rude”, but all the characters are about as different from each other as the Jamaican Bob Sled team is to the Austrian Limbo dancers.

When Josh tells his Scary Story, his story is really scary, and when he shows a White Boy breaking it down, you know this man is a genius in progress. The title piece was the most poignant as it shows actual photos of Josh as a baby through his teen years, but the closing Sip of Lemonade was one of the funniest.

The number of people who do a one person show keeps growing, but the number who can do it with intelligence, style and creativity and still deliver a meaningful message is dwindling. Put Josh T. Ryan at the head of this elite line, for he is one of the few who sees the little human foibles and turns the mirror back so we can see their absurdity. His sarcasm is biting and his jabs poke deep, sometimes too uncomfortably, but always wrapped in humor so no matter how piercing, there is a comforting message that there are many people just as zany and that there is a way out – no matter how deep and black the sludge. That’s something one can laugh about. – Backstage

Press Release

“Josh works a restrained rockabilly look, with statement sideburns and chain wallet. His chunky belt buckle conceals an ultra-compact pistol. Josh is a loud talker but a good listener and very highly Red Bull’d. He displays the fast-adapting charm of an ace salesman, dishing out hip-hop slang to youngsters, Eagle Scout diligence to military types, historical knowledge to the collectors, Hebrew to the orthodox Jews, and flirtation to the grannies. He strikes just the right gangster-leaning pose in attending to the youngsters who come in wearing T-shirts depicting Al Pacino as Tony Montana in Scarface. (Such clothing might be appropriate attire for a mid-level coke deal, but in the context of a legitimate gun shop, it just looks gauche.) “It’s just like working in a bar,” Josh says, referring to the essential part of the job in which he tends to his patrons’ desire to make small talk, share anecdotes, and express feelings of mortal terror…. This is one of America’s top salesman…” -The Slate.com

Directing:

Directors LAB 2017

Invited director.

Othello

ng:

Morrison Christmas

inspired by the Liberation Through Hearing During The Intermediate State, or Bardo Tordrol, The Lizard King, and the psychedelic Blue Light Distraction of Christmas Ensemble. Conceived and directed by critically acclaimed performance artist, Josh T. Ryan. Bringing together artists in honor of the traditions of The Living Theatre, The Open Theatre, and Peter Brook.