Tooling around

In 1988 Tim Ryan was finishing up a Broadway run in Tina Howe?s well-received play, ?Coastal Disturbances,? when the call came from his agent that he?d been asked to audition for a new series to be called ?China Beach.?
The Staten Island-born actor and graduate of Rutgers University, who?s now 44, answered the call and found himself playing the role of Natch Austin, opposite Dana Delany, for two-and-a-half years.
Ryan, who last week earned the Best Solo Performance Award in the recently completed Eighth Annual New York International Fringe Festival for his show ?All the Help You Need: The Adventures of a Hollywood Handyman,? eventually married and fathered a daughter, Zoe Patricia, who?s now 7. When ?China Beach? ended, the actor found himself relying more and more on TV commercials for income with which to support his family.
In the spring of 2000, there was a strike, curtailing production of commercials. It lasted eight months.
When Ryan and his family really started needing money, the actor, having put himself through Rutgers by doing construction work, took his toolbox out of mothballs and printed up business cards that said, ?All The Help You Need,? and began referring to himself as ?The Hollywood Handyman.?
?I?d mainly done carpentry, and I could frame up a house, because that?s pretty much what I?d done when I worked those college summers on Staten Island,? he said.
As he worked, his skills multiplied. ?Now I can do drywall, a little bit of electric, a little bit of plumbing, I can put in doors and windows, that sort of stuff,? he said.
Not that he?s turned his back on acting. Ryan likes to remind his audiences that Harrison Ford worked as a carpenter for a long time before his movie career flowered.
?If the acting takes off again, that would be hopefully very nice,? he said. ?If it does, I?d buy places that are run down and fix them up.?
Tim Ryan, his wife, Nancy Rainford, and their daughter now live in a house close to Hollywood Bowl.
He remembered, in a general sort of way, how his show, ?All the Help You Need: The Adventures of a Hollywood Handyman,? germinated in his mind.
?I realized I was working for some very odd people,? he said. ?I just sort of wanted to write it all down, while I could still remember the details. I didn?t know what it was going to come to, but I wanted to write about it. I think the first time I had the impulse was when I was working for this hooker.?
Ryan had little, if any, difficulty determining that his employer was indeed a prostitute.
?There were all kinds of fetish material around the house [like] padding on the walls, inches thick,? he recalled. ?There?s a funny thing about working for hookers. They?re all totally obsessed with the idea of keeping their places clean. You?d have a girl in hot pants and a tube shirt or something, with obviously augmented breasts, and she?d be wearing rubber gloves, scrubbing the place down with 409, or some other powerful cleaning spray.?
?China Beach? had only been off the air a short while when Ryan started working as a handyman, so it stands to reason that people often recognized him from his Natch Austin days. Sometimes, people would recognize him from his TV commercials.
?One time, I was working on a couple?s deck, sanding it and finishing it,? he said. ?On about the third day, when I got there, they we both standing at the door, waiting for me. They said, ?You?re on a TV commercial we saw last night, aren?t you?? ?
Such spottings tend to follow a pattern.
?They always want to know what else you?ve done,? he said. ?Sometimes I deny it because I don?t want to be bothered, but there are other reasons, too. If they find out you?re an actor, some people tend to think you?re not going to be any good at working, so they look over your shoulder and question everything you do.?
Ryan first performed ?All the Help You Need? in June 2002.
?I was part of a theater company called the Blue Sphere Alliance Theater and we did a series called ?Solos in Harmony,? ? he said. ?Six members would prepare personal pieces 15 minutes long, and that?s how the show started. I?d made all these notes, so I told the company, ?I think I?ve got a show here.? ?
Ryan had taken a class in the development of solo shows with Mark Travis, who had directed Chazz Palminteri?s ?A Bronx Tale,? and it was he who suggested that the actor continue working on his ?Handyman? material.
Helpful as Travis was, it is the current production?s director, Christopher Fessenden, to whom Ryan gives most of the credit for getting the show to the 60-minute form in which it played at the New York International Fringe Festival.
?Travis gave me the storytelling tools it took to shape the story,? he said.
In the 15-minute Blue Sphere version of the work, there was a brief mention of an enormous woman who never left her bed.
?I tell you about her house, and what it was like, and everything else,? Ryan said. ?She spends her days on the Internet, buying useless stuff. She had money, so she had people who took care of her. The house was big and it was full of all sorts of collectible items. . . . She had every Barbie doll you ever heard of. So, in this version, it?s not just a line about a huge woman who couldn?t get out of bed.?
Ryan knows that exposure to human extremes like the ones in his show has intensified the acuity of his acting, and he?s grateful for it.
?I think it has opened me up to a wider range of human experience,? he said.