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Makin? it on his own

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

Randy Ryan, the charismatic Irish-American actor at the center of much of the production?s hour-long action, has some issues of his own, stemming from a difficult and complicated personal history that continues to haunt him.
At 37, Ryan, a former paratrooper and army base boxer, is still almost as much of a finely honed athlete as he is a versatile actor. His physical skills were paramount in the galvanic performance he turned in last summer in Daniel Reitz?s powerful but imperfect drama ?Lowlife,? a study of a failed light heavyweight boxer, Johnny ?The Fire? McGuire, on his way to being ground up by the corrosive machinery of the Hollywood ?system? in his attempt to become a working actor.
The play, which the actor helped develop at Naked Angels? ongoing weekly sessions of play readings and screenplay samplings, known as Tuesday Nights at Nine, provided him with ideal exposure.
?Lowlife? played three well-received and sold-out performances and once again Ryan found himself having to scratch for work, which he did until ?Powder Keg? came along. The production at the Flea is, like ?Lowlife,? an unpaid showcase, but at least the actors are being seen, and, in Ryan?s case especially, seen to great advantage.
Ryan has made a couple of independent films, one of which, ?The Forgotten,? played the Three Rivers Film Festival this month. There are, as well, another pair of films in his future, at least potentially.
Ryan, however, after 10 hardscrabble years in New York, knows better than to count his chickens.
Randy Ryan, or Randall, as his birth certificate would have it, was born in West Tennessee, the second child of Wanda McDaniel, a woman who had migrated North and had become employed as a hostess at Hugh Heffner?s Playboy Mansion in Chicago in its earliest incarnation as a hedonistic fun palace. Ryan was an infant when his mother returned to Chicago.
The actor never knew his father, Budd Ryan. As an adult, trying to search him out, Ryan learned nothing much beyond the fact that he had fathered several other children in Chicago and had died relatively young.
?My mother never quite figured out what my father did for a living, except that he was a sharp dresser, which led her to think he might be connected with the mob, or possibly with gamblers,? Ryan said recently.
Ryan?s sister, Rhonda, is a year older than her brother. When the actor was 13, his mother, unable to cope with two growing children in a tiny Chicago apartment, sent them both to her much oldest sister, Jean, who, with her husband, ran a pig farm in Henderson, Tenn.
?My aunt Jean had delivered me when she was working at a small clinic in Henderson County, so coming back to her was like closing the circle,? Ryan said. ?I always thought of them as grandparents, because they were so much older than my mother. They told me, ?OK, you can stay here until you?re out of high school, but then you have to leave here and go out and make a life.? ?
When Ryan finished high school, he had no idea where he wanted to go or what he wanted to do. He did the only thing that seemed logical. He joined the army, signing up in the middle of his senior year in what was called a ?delayed-entry program.?
His 2-year military stint was spent largely at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, as part of the 18th Airborne Corps.
?When I got out,? Ryan said, ?I used what?s known as the Army College Fund, the new version of the old G.I. Bill of Rights, and enrolled at North Carolina State University at Raleigh.
It was in college that Ryan discovered acting. ?I came to New York to be an actor,? he said. ?It was crazy.?
Once in the city, he started taking classes at the Circle-in-the-Square.
Growing up fatherless in a family situation that was, at the least, dysfunctional, has left Ryan with concerns that, as he openly admits, have marked his life and continue to do so.
?I have issues around abandonment,? he said, ?and I have a lot of fears which are with me every day.?
The actor, despite a public surface that seems to combine a quotient of unselfconscious Southern charm with a certain measure of gentle near-passivity, has depths that inform his life and his work. For one thing, he writes often and well, keeping, among other things a series of journals and diaries he?s maintained since his boyhood. If he hadn?t become an actor, he might have been a writer. Some of what he writes takes the form of aphorisms, or, more accurately, brief, punchy entries that almost resemble some sort of backwoods equivalent of the Japanese haiku.
Ryan has a pronounced proclivity for research, which stood him in good stead when he was preparing for ?Powder Keg,? a loosely organized collection of scenes that might easily come across as scattershot.
Because he wanted to know more about the struggles going on across the years in Southwestern Europe, he started reading, and, with the help of the Internet, came up with a sort of informal manifesto detailing the life and times of the war-torn Balkans.
?I found some stuff that really amazed me, stuff that indicated that, even in the worst of times, the people didn?t entirely abandon their sense of humor,? Ryan said.
Examples he cites, and which he collected in a brochure he used through rehearsals for the Dukovski play, include T-shirts people in Belgrade and elsewhere wore with targets imprinted on them.
?During the air raids, people would gather on their balconies for parties and to listen to the bombs going off, which they referred to as the Serbian National Orchestra,? Ryan said. ?And they?d shout into the night sky, saying things like, ?No, no, a little more to the left.? I found the people simply amazing, and it helped me to understand the background of the play, which had some pretty dark humor in it, along with all the agony and bitterness.?
In preparing for ?Lowlife,? Ryan went to Gleason?s Gym in Brooklyn to get his boxing moves back. ?They helped me when it came to getting me back into the right rhythm,? Ryan said. ?I had a trainer there who was part of something they call White Collar Boxing, where guys from Wall Street come and work each other over. I jumped rope and hung around the boxers again, and it helped.?
The actor?s primary sport is basketball, and a few years ago, he did a basketball play by Liz Tuccillo called ?Joe Fearless.? It began at the Atlantic Theater and did a couple of subsequent workshops, but, in the end, it never achieved the ongoing life people hoped it might have.
Meanwhile, Randy Ryan still plays basketball. He recently took part in the Nike-sponsored three-on-three tournament called ?Hoop It Up 2003,? first at the South Street Seaport and then in Philadelphia.
Ryan?s team won in both cities, and the actor came home with trophies under each arm. He also returned with a cut chest and a broken nose. ?I may have to rethink basketball,? he said.

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