Creating Space, Symbolically and Literally

Talking with Ryan Czerwonko about acting, Stella Adler, Tennessee Williams, talent chi, Beach Rats, Camille Paglia, and his theatre company Adult Film

A couple years ago, through a mutual friend, I became aware of Ryan Czerwonko. We “became friends” on Instagram, and his posts revealed a kindred spirit. He would post on John Cassavetes, Lee Strasberg, Marlon Brando. He is an actor, a director, and seemed - from what I could tell on Instagram - to be working constantly in a close group of actors on films and different projects. We started talking. I learned more about what he was doing. He and some friends had formed Adult Film, a theatre company with a broad scope, operating out of his apartment in Bushwick. I was intrigued by the work they were doing.

(All photos of Adult Film classes and performances provided to me by Ryan)

Ryan is not only an actor, but a devoted acting teacher. He teaches acting classes out of his apartment, a hub of creativity and collaboration. To me, all of this looked like utopia, living the dream. In a crushing world of “No”s, of increasing corporatization of art, of more and more barriers to entry, particularly in New York, where everything is prohibitively expensive, Ryan and his friends at Adult Film were carving out their own path. It’s okay to complain about how unfair things are. It’s natural, it’s human. But at a certain point, you have to stop complaining and start doing. I knew actors who complained 24/7. They were so negative nobody wanted to work with them. The people who actually bring about change are those who DO. Who look around at the opportunities afforded them (or lack thereof), and say, “Well, no, that is not acceptable. I will make my own opportunities. I won’t beg for a place at your table. I will make my own damn table.” This is what Adult Film is doing. They aren’t just talking the talk. They’re actually doing it. They host film screenings, they do workshops and readings, they have held two theatre and film festivals, two-day events packed with one-act play performances and short films. I attended one of these, and there was a huge enthusiastic turnout. People are starving for this kind of experience.

Audience at one of Adult Film’s rooftop screenings

In April, Adult Film is producing a program of one-acts, a daunting line-up: August Strindberg’s The Stronger, Eugene O’Neill’s Ile, and Tennessee Williams’ 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. The night is called “Daddy Issues”, and will be held at Purgatory, a bar/performance space in Brooklyn (675 Central Avenue). Performance dates: April 8, 9, 15, 16. You can purchase tickets here.

I wanted to talk with Ryan about Adult Film, and about his philosophies around work, acting, and living as an artist in an unfriendly bottom-line-driven environment.

We finally carved out some time. Ryan and I text and message each other a lot, which we refer back to quite a bit in our conversation below. I admire what Ryan and Adult Film are doing. I admire people who DO, rather than just talk about doing. I admire Adult Film’s boldness and daring, their willingness to go out on a limb, to not just talk about dedication and desire, but to live it, and live it loud.

SOM: How did Adult Film come about?

RC: In my 20s, I lived in Chicago, Atlanta, and finally I moved to New York. I discovered I liked coaching. I started making my own films about six years ago and would use the same actors over and over. We would get together and do group-led classes. Before the pandemic, I was in a group that did performance art parties - it was like installations in apartments - and then during the pandemic, people started doing all this underground theatre. We were tired of waiting around so my friend Roman D'Ambrosio - who's a great playwright - and I formed Adult Film together.

RC: We have eight company members. We've done two film and theatre festivals. We've done a lot of screenings and readings. Our upcoming "Daddy Issues" night featuring one-act plays by Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and August Strindberg is our first time just doing a play. Adult Film is a platform, yes, but it's more like an antidote. For me, it's all of the things I've been working towards for many years, and it's all in one place. I teach there, we're making a crime anthology series this year with some filmmakers who've joined us, we're doing theatre. It's also practical. It's about meeting other artists and involving them in our work. There's an involved community feel to it.

Stella Adler

RC: In my class and when I direct, I set a lot of things up for people, but it's difficult sometimes in our helplessness culture for people to trust their intuition. I say "intuition". Stella Adler would call it the histrionic side meeting the literary side. Whatever it is, it's all your images, thoughts, feelings, intuition, being used to approach this role and this play right now. And that's all there is. Who knows the character better than you?

SOM: Can you talk about helplessness culture and what you have observed in your classes? What's in the way of actors being free?

RC: A lot of the people who approach me to study with me are already moving past it. I am not pretending to be anything I'm not. I have a decade or so of experience. I'm obsessed with acting, and I'm a really good teacher, I don't have an MFA, I'm not a series regular, I can't offer people the secret, but I do have a dedicated connection and passion for the craft. I'm not an accredited studio where you pay $400 for a month of class, and you go to a class and you sit for 2 and a half hours, and you work for maybe 20 minutes, someone gives you notes, and then you sit down again. That's not what we do in class. In my class, we spend about half of every class doing physical and vocal work, along with playing around with text. In terms of what I'm seeing, and what's in the way, this goes off what I said about intuition: There's a lack of libido. And I don't just mean sexual. I mean like Jung's term, your libido - your forward-moving life force, your spiritual physical connection to things you're passionate about. It seems to take a lot to drag that out of people now.

RC: I am seeing a lot of actors who are getting into acting for unknown reasons and then having to find the reasons later. The libido - or we might call it "chi" - it's not necessarily natural, it's something you practice, and nourish, and grow, just like a physical goal you have with fitness, or intellectual goal, with reading, watching films, acting workouts. This all adds up to Talent Chi, ultimately. At a certain tipping point, it's free. But it does take a lot.

RC: I think I've always had a big amount of natural talent, but as my psychological problems overtook me in my teens and my 20s, paired with my initial acting training, I had a big ice block to break through. I chipped and chipped for years, and finally about 3 or 4 years ago, it cracked. And now I know I'm there. I know who I am in it, which doesn't necessarily reflect in how many bookings I get.

SOM: You were telling me about one of your great acting teachers, Maria Dizzia. Can you talk a little bit about what you learned from her?

RC: Maria is the person who cracked the ice block. She's a really wonderful New York theatre, film and television actress. She works at really high levels in all three of those areas. I met her right before the pandemic. The things she taught me totally internalized my approach. I did one-on-one coaching with her and then I took her scene study classes. I pretty much took a class with her every week for over three years.

Maria Dizzia

RC: What I admire about her is she's an actor who works all the time, yet she's also a brilliant teacher. It's very rare to have someone teaching acting who does that. She's a huge role model for me. She incorporates a lot of things in her process. She uses Warner Loughlin's technique for script analysis. She works from How to Stop Acting, by Harold Guskin, which is also about script analysis. She also uses the teachings of Lindy Davies, this really great Australian teacher, whose work is all about images, thoughts, feelings. Davies calls it "sourcing". Sourcing is your connection to the text. I use all this when I teach. I also studied at HB Studio, I did Strasberg for a while. I throw lots of things in.

SOM: I read the memoirs of all those Actors Studio people in the 50s, and it's all so exciting but it also just highlights how the New York theatre world is just so different now.

RC: I started Adult Film because something pissed me off. I watched a New York Times Style video-article and it was all these actors who are very famous now, all in their 50s and 60s, and they were nostalgically talking about how back in the 70s you could throw a stone and hit a theatre company. Chicago is still like that, by the way. There's like 200 theatre companies there. But I saw this video and I was like "That's so nice you have such fine memories. Could you all donate 2 million dollars because space is completely unaffordable here now."

RC: I used my apartment building for one of our festivals. People use bars, lofts. The place we're doing the one-acts is a bar, and it's affordable, but it's in my neighborhood. I can't afford to rent something in Manhattan. The willfulness to do work despite the limitations is part of what's driving us at Adult Film.

SOM: This is how change has to happen. People just decide to do shit on their own, they stop waiting for permission, they make their own rules. Look at what Cassavetes did.

RC: Cassavetes is maybe my single greatest influence and inspiration. I look at what he did and I'm like, if what he did was groundbreaking in its own way back then, and now - through Criterion box sets and etc. - we all have such reverence for it - why does nothing have those values anymore? Or almost nothing. Where did his influence go?

Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes

SOM: Dan Callahan is very interesting on that. Current-day directors seem a little afraid of actors. They follow Robert Bresson's model. Bresson called his actors "models". You don't need to be trained to be a good actor, but when you are totally untrained, what sometimes happens is you get these actors who have no skills and nothing to rely on or fall back on, so they fall back on generalized "attitude". Everything sounds the same. No one speaks in a distinctive voice.

RC: People are so disconnected from their voices right now.

SOM: Because we don't talk as much as we used to?

RC: Exactly. And so that's half of what I do in my classes. I teach people to talk to themselves in their acting process, just to get connected. Even just before starting an audition tape, you can do your own improv with yourself so you can forget yourself and something can start happening. Physicalizing is important too. Maria showed me this video, and it reminds me of some of the stuff you've written about, like Sarah Siddons chopping wood in the alley before the sleepwalking scene in Macbeth. Maria showed me a video of Jack Nicholson on the set of The Shining and he's running around with an axe, hacking the air, and talking to himself, while everyone else is preparing and getting ready all around him. That's what I tell my actors in class. You can be artistic on a set. You can do that on a set. No one cares. If you're too afraid to even step outside the box - or do anything that might make you look foolish or strange - then I don't really know why you want to be an actor in the first place. I don't know why we're doing this.

SOM: You have to own your own process, you mean?

RC: Yes. Because there's the text, okay? People take the text and reflect it. That's fine. But what's around the text? This goes back to Stella Adler when she gets angry at her students rushing to say the text, or just trying to "play" the text. There's sound and body around the text. All of your responses to the text are located within your body, and your responses literally comes out your vocal channel, and it's all about the imaginative involved physical responses to what the text is provoking in you. People don't practice that. They literally don't know how to do it. I try to get people really interested in it. Because when I started working that way, when I started working with Maria, I just started to have more fun.

SOM: I don't know if this is connected, but I was thinking about it as you were talking about the impossibility of finding space in New York. You and I have discussed the condescending dismissive attitude towards the working class that we often sense in theatre and film. And how this condescending attitude impacts everything - how stories are told, what stories are told, the casting choices, everything. Where are the working-class artists?

RC: I was just thinking about this earlier today. It's like, Okay, so I can't rent a space in Manhattan. Well, okay, then I'll work in a great space in my own neighborhood. And whoever wants to come to it, will. I'm not going to break my back to get a space I can't afford. I am going to be who I am and work where I can work. I'm not gonna chase fashion.

SOM: Along those lines, we've discussed Eliza Hittman and Beach Rats. To me, Hittman makes films coming from an authentic working-class place. There’s no condescension in her films towards the blue-collar world. I remember reading some of the criticisms of the film, it was the usual: "Why is he dating a girl, though? Why is he in the closet? That's not good representation. Aren't we past this?" Could you talk about Beach Rats and how this connects to what we've been talking about, and the reality she's showing, and why we need it so badly?

Beach Rats (2017; d. Eliza Hittman)

RC: I love that film because Manhattan is 5 miles away from Bay Ridge but it's an entirely different world. Beach Rats shows the complexity of all of those non-identities. It shows that there is no identity, that real identity is so imperceptible between the things we look at as categories. It's like, "He's gay, why is he with a girl?" No, he's not gay. He's questioning or maybe he's bisexual. He doesn't even have the words for it. He can't "be queer" because he doesn't know what "being queer" is, and this doesn't make that character any less of a human being, for not having the vocabulary or quote education to name themselves.

Beach Rats (2017; d. Eliza Hittman)

RC: And "aren't we past this?" I mean, aren't we past THIS? Why does everyone have to be strong-armed into these labels? I hate to even talk about a scale of actualization, because the person who doesn't have the words for it is just as actualized as someone who does. This whole type of conversation to me is boring. I mean, I'm bisexual, but I don't even like using that word, because sometimes I feel homosexual. I don't like using the word queer, because queer to me used to imply a sensibility, and when I thought of queer I thought of Oscar Wilde and Tennessee Williams, and now it seems to be strictly about sexuality or branding. I throw the word "gay" around a lot. I don't really feel gay, but I feel like I can use the word gay because I have homosexual experiences. I like the word homosexual better. But I'm also bisexual.

SOM: So when you see Beach Rats, would you say you see yourself, and your childhood friends and environment?

Beach Rats (2017; d. Eliza Hittman)

RC: Absolutely. I'm from an abandoned steel town. I'm now much softer towards my upbringing and the way my parents did things. I really understand them and see them now. Because they had to fucking work. My mother is a bus driver and my father is a construction worker and they live in a very specific world. They were never hateful but how could they understand? Now I live this fantasy life - which is a dream I've created for myself - but not everybody has the capability to do that and the people who can do that for themselves shouldn't judge people who aren't able to. And when it comes to the condescension I see towards the working class, I'm like, "Who do you think made the fucking train you're riding on? Who do you think made the bridge the train goes over? Who do you think made the roads? It was working class people." I guess people judge solely based on political leanings. To me, the political darkness and the social problems America has goes so much deeper than the obvious "Who did you vote for?"

RC: This elitist attitude is reflected in current-day theatre. So many of the topical contemporary plays are written for people who already agree with the subject. Tennessee Williams, though, Tennessee Williams did not write for the elite. He wrote for the masses. His plays were turned into screenplays that became some of the most popular films of the 1950s and 1960s. Your average person in the last 50 years can reference Brando in Streetcar or Paul Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and it has nothing to do with their education level. How did we go from a time where something so exquisite and high-art and subversive was regular mainstream entertainment?

Tennessee Williams

RC: And with the subversive thing: This is what is so erotic about Tennessee Williams. The characters can't come out and say everything out loud! But now, Brick has to be a proud queer man. Well, but, he's bisexual, and it's frankly homophobic for everyone to be like "Brick's gay." What does Blanche say? I'm paraphrasing, but it's like, "Straight? What's straight? A line can be straight - but a human heart can't be..." It's a bizarre paradox to try to categorize the un-nameable, but everyone seems to be obsessed with it right now.

RC: There's all this ambiguity expressed in Williams, the ambiguity of the homosexual subtext, and by homosexual subtext I don't mean "gay". I literally mean erotic attraction between men, which isn't exclusively gay. In Kazan's book on directing, he says he thought Brando was a homosexual with a heterosexual adjustment. And I'm like, "That's me!" Some people do feel that way about their own masculinity or femininity. I think why people want to squash this out is it hints at the greater mystery of life, which reminds everyone of death, and we don't like death.

Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando

SOM: In one of our recent conversations, you mentioned having seen Michael Raymond James in a reading at the Studio. I saw him play Brick in the Berkshires, and he was one of the best Bricks I've ever seen. It was fascinating. Brick says so little (until he says a lot), but for the most part, Brick is just standing there as everyone talks around him. In the production I saw, it was literally as though Michael Raymond James had a keylight on him the whole time.

RC: That's charisma.

SOM: And he did so much back-ting too, Ryan!

RC: Yeah, I did this reading at the Actors Studio and he was in another reading and he wore this wide-brimmed hat and he was leaning forward so you could only see the top of his head. This takes me back to Cassavetes' films and in some of those shots all you see is Gena Rowlands' hair. The lack of the face - and this is what back-ting does too: what's the negative space created by the absence of the face? What does it make you do? How does it make you lean in?

SOM: This is why I love the old-school actors like Bette Davis. Her energy and creativity and understanding of the character was so total it emanated from her back, and she knew it, and she could do it consciously. Her body moving through space IS the story.

RC: This is the space I want actors to create for themselves. No one teaches them to do it because they think they're all in service of the director and the play.

SOM: Do you think some of this has to do with training for camera work and closeup?

RC: Absolutely. But I'm sorry, look at Isabelle Huppert. She barely moves her face, barely moves a muscle. My Alexander teacher says "letting go down to come up". Huppert's letting go down into the earth, into her feet, into her pelvis, her body is perfectly aligned in its natural function, which enables this full voice and intention to come directly out of the top of her head, without her using her muscles to indicate anything.

RC: For me, that's what I'm working towards. That's what I try to teach my students, to have all this intense physical and vocal life, but you're using nothing extraneously to communicate it.

SOM: Are they getting it?

RC: Yes. As soon as I give them this stuff it's like watching a plant grow. I've been teaching this way for 9 months now and some people have been with me the whole time and they have transformed completely. They have this life and sense of humor and richness of sharing self that they did not have before. Or it was buried.

SOM: You're workshopping three plays right now for the Daddy Issues night of one-acts, correct?

RC: Yes. Strindberg's The Stronger, O'Neill's Ile, and then the Tennessee Williams' 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. We're calling the night Daddy Issues. I'm gonna throw PJ Harvey and Lana Del Ray into the mix, too. I love adding dance sequences into things. For The Stronger, the cast is two women. One speaks, the other one is silent. The question is: who's more powerful?

SOM: How do you work with actors in material like The Stronger?

RC: I'm just following what Stella Adler wrote in her book on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov. She writes about The Stronger and I'm like … There's probably no better way to analyze that play so I’ll just go with that.

SOM: Let's talk about deconstructing 27 Wagons Full of Cotton / Baby Doll and how you're thinking about it.

RC: I stumbled on an excerpt from John Lithgow's autobiography where he talks about Meryl Streep's audition to play Flora in 27 Wagons, which she won a Tony for, it's really what "broke" her.

Meryl Streep as Flora, in 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, 1976

RC: Lithgow said she came into the audition room, started chatting, and while she was doing this, she started stuffing her bra with Kleenex, putting heels on - and then - Lithgow uses the word "imperceptibly" - she "imperceptibly" became Baby Doll. That's the philosophy behind how I approach everything. There is no difference between you and the character. Even though we think of Meryl Streep as someone who makes giant leaps into some other world that the rest of us aren't privy to in our talent, we all have access to that process. We're exploring how can we let the audience in on the process. Is Flora herself stuffing her bra onstage? We're working with highlighting the grotesquerie and absurdity. Not commenting on it but acknowledging it, and acknowledging "I'm an actor doing a play right now."

Carroll Baker, Eli Wallach, Baby Doll (d. Elia Kazan; 1955)

RC: We all re-watched Baby Doll in preparation. The energy in the film doesn't necessarily leap out from the page when you're reading it, but I want to streamline the piece to get the film’s madcap dark erotic fun and games energy in . I love how in the film Eli Wallach will sort of massage into Carroll Baker, and then he'll snap on her. But every time he gets really rough with her, she opens up even more. I want to see how far we can go with that. Flora lives her life as a baby doll, she wants a Daddy. What are the archetypes these people are embodying? We're underlining the archetypes and using them as a way to play, realistically.

SOM: Archetypes makes me think of the piece Mike Crumplar wrote about you and Roman and Adult Film on his Substack. He really zoomed in on the whole Camille Paglia thing. He called you all a “theater cult of Paglia". [Hanging out with the Theater Cult of Paglia] I'm wondering how Paglia comes into this whole thing. Or does she?

RC: Obviously, he used her name as a headline grabber. Paglia is a big influence on Roman and me, and on us as a group, but so are eight other things. He didn't say in the headline that we were a “Tennessee Williams Cult”, even though that would be accurate too. You and I have discussed Paglia's piece on Liz Taylor and how great it is, and then I think of her hatred of Meryl Streep, and it's kind of like: Does it always have be either/or, Camille? But I admire her ability to theatrically make a point. People have to have the space to do that. The erotic volatile energy coming out of Camille's writings is palpable.

Camille Paglia

RC: I started reading her in late 2020. I read through each book one after the other and it really changed me. I've been working with a Jungian therapist for five years and it really started getting under my skin around that same time. I love the way Paglia sees energy symbolically. We think of things in abstract ways, like, say, the Catholic Church - but she helped me see - energetically - through the libido - how the Church was constructed based on the psychology of the people who were alive then. This is basically what Stella Adler would do to analyze a script. I started seeing things more symbolically and less literally. For instance, Paglia's concepts of the Apollonian and the Dionysian have been very important for me. All of this sexual freedom, quote unquote, that's going on right now is actually the Apollonian masquerading as the Dionysian and that's what's so fucked up about it. It's a highly structured authoritarian jail calling itself freedom, but only gives permission slips for what it deems appropriate.

RC: Another thing I find missing right now is people are afraid to be obsessed with things. An obsession makes you lose your cool. I meet actors who are very shy and almost ashamed to be obsessed with the art of acting. They're maybe interested in some of the results of the craft, or the things associated with it - but not with the workmanlike demands of the craft itself. I find all of these things thrilling and amazing tools for me to continue revealing myself to myself which then improves my relatedness to other people.

SOM: Obsession comes with great risk. So does sex, art, love. Paglia does talk about that all the time.

RC: I'm paraphrasing but Paglia refers to artists, and particularly actors, as the bisexual continuum between the sexes. This gets into personae, and all the stuff Dan Callahan writes about in his books on actors. The femininity in Brando is what makes him so masculine, and the masculinity in Katharine Hepburn is what makes her so feminine. The link to these personae is really frayed right now and causing a lot of wacky behavior. It's my goal or hope to expose people to it and create a space for those kinds of explorations.

Rooftop screening, Adult Film

FURTHER INFO:

Adult Film’s “Daddy Issues”
April 8, 9, 15, 16 at Purgatory, 675 Central Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11207
Tickets here