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

Josh T. Ryan

There are artists who follow a recognizable path, and then there are artists who seem to invent their own. Josh T. Ryan belongs to the latter.

An actor, director, producer, and performance artist, Ryan has spent more than three decades moving between comedy, classical theatre, experimental performance, independent film, television, and the underground theatre world of Los Angeles. What makes his career unusual is not simply its range, but the sensibility connecting it all: a restless imagination, a love of transformation, and an instinct for finding the unexpected inside the familiar.

As an actor, Ryan is first and foremost a comedian, but not in the conventional sense. His comedy is physical, eccentric, expressive, and deeply rooted in character. Back Stage once described him as a “Post Modern Red Skelton,” an unusually fitting description for an actor whose performances can move from subtle absurdity to full physical invention. Like the great comic performers of an earlier generation, Ryan understands that comedy can begin with the body, the face, the pause, and the willingness to surrender completely to a character. His performances can be playful, strange, vulnerable, and entirely unpredictable.

Behind the comedy is a serious student of performance.

Ryan’s artistic world has been shaped by figures as diverse as Peter Brook, Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Jerzy Grotowski, Michael Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, Shakespeare, Charles Bukowski, Werner Herzog, and Harmony Korine. Rather than adhering to a single theatrical doctrine, he has absorbed ideas from artists who challenged convention and transformed them into a language of his own.

That impulse became particularly visible during his twenty six years with Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group.

From 1991 through 2017, Ryan served as Co Founding Associate Artistic Director, working alongside his longtime friend Zombie Joe and helping create one of Los Angeles’ most distinctive independent theatre companies. At ZJU, Ryan was actor, director, producer, collaborator, and creative instigator. The work was intimate, physical, irreverent, and frequently experimental, with classical texts treated not as sacred objects but as material to be reinvented.

His 2002 production of Othello, one of several productions of the play he would undertake, brought particular recognition, with actor T. Arthur Cottam receiving a Valley Theatre League Artistic Director Achievement Award for his work in the production.

As a director, Ryan developed a reputation for seeing possibilities others overlooked. Los Angeles publications have repeatedly characterized his directorial work as visionary, reflecting an approach that favors imagination over formula and discovery over predictability. His theatre asks what might happen when an actor is given room to transform, when a familiar story is placed in an unfamiliar environment, and when an audience is invited to see something it did not expect.

After ZJU, Ryan became an Associate Artistic Director of RAZE THE SPACE, the international theatre project founded by director, writer, and poet Martin Jago. His work there expanded into new writing, devised performance, classical theatre, and international collaboration.

He directed Donna Latham’s Glacial Decline in 2015 and David MacGregor’s Incident on the Golden Gate Bridge in 2019, receiving the festival’s Best Director award. He also appeared as the Guard in Sophocles’ Antigone at the Mark Taper Auditorium in Los Angeles. Under Martin Jago’s direction, Ryan’s performance in Padre was also singled out as a standout of its festival season.

His career has never stopped crossing boundaries. Ryan created, executive produced, and starred in the Showtime series Lock N Load, while continuing to work in independent film, television, theatre, and performance coaching.

There is something distinctly Los Angeles about his story. Ryan emerged from the city’s alternative theatre culture, a world of small rooms, midnight performances, ambitious artists, and productions created with more imagination than money. He did not simply participate in that culture. He helped build it.

After decades in the theatre, Ryan eventually stepped away from professional stage work for roughly a decade, devoting much of that time to family and life outside the industry. His return to creative work carries the perspective of someone who has experienced both the exhilaration of making art and the value of living beyond it.

Perhaps the best way to understand Josh T. Ryan is not through a particular genre or title. He is a comic actor with a taste for the surreal, a director drawn to the visionary, and an artist who has spent his career moving freely between the classical and the unconventional.

At the center of it all is curiosity.

Ryan has never seemed particularly interested in asking what theatre is supposed to be.

He is much more interested in discovering what it could be.

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.