The Brooklyn Rail

In the tight confines of a basement in Ridgewood, ten acting students swirled around each other, muttering lines from the plays of Tennessee Williams.

“Too loud,” announced Ryan Czerwonko, the class’s instructor and artistic director of the DIY-theater and training company Adult Film. “Whisper.”

One actor laid down on the floor, murmuring words towards the sky. Others stepped over him. Czerwonko started playing loud techno music through a speaker. A few bodies lay together on a bed in the corner, holding each other.

“Stanley and Blanche in abstract!” Czerwonko yelled over the music, switching to rock. The mass of movement became more aggressive, with a few accidental collisions. One actor pulled off his shirt and threw it in another student’s face.

“True West girls!”

An invocation of the suffocating Sam Shepard drama, to be performed later in the class by female performers, shifted the mood again. The group became a heaping mass of bodies piled together in the center of the basement space. A few moaned quietly as they formed one desperate, floundering organism.

Czerwonko turned off the music. The actors stood, snapping out of it, and started setting up for the first scene study of the class: Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski’s tense meeting early in A Streetcar Named Desire.

*

Observing this warm-up exercise in Czerwonko’s eighteen-week Class Company (borrowed, he told me, from the “intuitive acting” pioneer Lindy Davies), I was taken back to my first major exposure to Adult Film in the fall of 2024.

Audiences arriving for the 2024 Film and Theatre Festival at the company’s modest Ridgewood location were led into the backyard and squeezed onto tarps. Around us, a cast of six performed Lanford Wilson’s poetic short play This Is The Rill Speaking, using every inch of the outdoor space. Czerwonko swung playfully from the garden shed and hollered to his fellow young lovers on the porch (Adult Film regulars Stephee Bonifacio, Matt Street, and Ethan Navarro among them). Above us, actors yelled down from the second floor windows, ushering us inside for the next act of the evening’s multibill: Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin’s Savage/Love.

That collection of poems was performed across two floors of the building. Audience members trailed the actors from room to room as they shared desperate confessions of love, longing, and lust. Film elements played concurrently in most spaces. The evening concluded with three short films screened downstairs in the basement, followed by a group debrief over wine and beer.

My very first visit to Adult Film had actually been four months prior, when I saw Julia Randall’s dementedly funny play Little Miss Ransom performed in that Ridgewood basement. (Czerwonko lives in that multi-level home, which transforms into rehearsal, class, and performance space.)

Four years into its lifespan, Adult Film has now grown into a teeming laboratory of productions, training, acting investigation, and new work development. Work has ranged from a carnivalesque staging of The Cherry Orchard at Rutgers Presbyterian Church, to Jess Barbagallo’s strange, macabre play Cemetery Soup at The Brick, to Eric Faris’s claustrophobic psychological study Cimino’s Defeat at Torn Page. But most of the work happens in the basement, most recently Lillian Mottern’s Godot-esque, Shepard-inspired new work Moonshiner, a dryly funny take on dystopian Los Angeles life.

At the center of it all is Czerwonko, an Ohio-born actor who leads the company and appears in many of its productions. That fall 2024 show embodied, in so many ways, his core vision for the company’s identity: a messy hodgepodge of performance experimentation, criss-crossing the porous boundaries of theater and film, discovering itself as it is performed and, above all, always deeply theatrical and profoundly alive.

With twenty-nine company members now involved, Adult Film also represents a new kind of quasi-educational-professional company: legacy companies like HB Studio and Stella Adler Studio of Acting still attract in Manhattan, but as more and more artists live in outer boroughs, Czerwonko has created an affordable gathering place that is closer to home.

“It is all an experiment,” said Czerwonko. “The company is this giant container for my interests—not just acting, but the artistry of directing, producing, film, running the training center. All the things I want to learn about. And there’s all these people who are interested in going on the journey with me. It’s fucking amazing. And it’s so much fucking fun.”

*

Back in Czerwonko’s intensive, scene partners Hannah Hale and Dylan Lesch had thrown together a makeshift Kowalski kitchen.

“You must be Stanley. I’m Blanche.”

“Stella’s sister?”

Before they’d gotten far, Czerwonko stopped Lesch.

“What’s the need?” he asked pointedly. A silence. Lesch is considering. “Oh,” Czerwonko muttered, disappointed that an answer wasn’t immediately at hand.

They worked the scene multiple times, stopping and starting, looking to find Stanley’s need. (The character is “a giant block of ice that every man must confront,” Czerwonko announced at one point.) Czerwonko threw prompts at Lesch throughout, pushing him to “find the thing,” his own entryway into full embodiment.

Czerwonko is an imposing if playful presence, broad shouldered with an angular jawline, carefully maintained moustache and tidy stubble. He tends to command control of a given room or conversation; as a teacher, he is sharp if never unkind.

“He doesn’t really filter, and he doesn’t baby his students,” said Hale, a company member who appeared in Cimino’s Defeat and was lead producer on Moonshiner. “And I appreciate that, because I think today in this industry, there is a lot of babying and coddling and petting and holding and carrying and caressing.”

“I got caught in an idea of him,” Lesch, back in the scene, eventually confessed. Czerwonko nodded. We’ve hit on a driving goal in the artistic director’s work, influenced by his Meisner training: don’t seek out the “correct” way to interpret the work, even a vaunted classic. Connect intensely with the living, breathing body across from you, and let your own core emotion rise out of that.

At school, Czerwonko later told me, an actor friend once described him as “a slave to the moment.” It wasn’t intended as a compliment, but he took it as one.

“It’s about what’s happening between the two people and what’s exciting,” he said. “Rather than being dutiful to the literalness of the play, which I think is bullshit.”

Czerwonko is also a believer in actors wholly crafting a staging around their performance, extending into lighting and costuming. In his intensive, actors are expected to walk in with all of these elements ready to go.

“Your trainers are killing me,” he later commented on Lesch’s costume. “Also not loving the baggy jeans. And your hair should be slicked back.”

They moved on. Over the course of five unbroken hours in the basement, the class moved through scenes from Streetcar; then Vieux Carré, a semi-autobiographical Williams play from 1977; and finally True West, with Stephee Bonifacio (four shows with Adult Film) and June Schreiner as the warring siblings. For their set, these actors trashed the basement, strewing garbage everywhere. The scene was visceral and violent, including semi-improvised roughhousing that sends props and bodies hurtling.

Over the course of the night, Czerwonko has thrown out Marilyn Monroe, Tina Satter (of experimental company Half Straddle), and Bette Davis as inspiration points. In the acting he’s trying to draw out of his students, he sees no contradiction between emotional immediacy and grand exhibitionism.

“It’s real, but very theatrical at the same time,” he said. “To me, the way Bette Davis’s acting interfaces with the world and the camera is real. I am a theatrically expressive person. All of us have these different modes in us, and I feel like our media restricts us to one or the other. We’re looking to defy that.”

At nearly 11 p.m., class was over, and the group headed to the bar—usually local joint Phil’s, but tonight it would be Mr. Nancy’s.

*

Czerwonko founded Adult Film in January 2022. The early days saw him throwing together evenings of one-acts in friend’s apartments, on front stoops, and in the basements of local bars. Daddy Issues, an evening of one acts by Eugene O’Neill, August Strindberg, and Williams, played in the basement of queer bar Purgatory; Small Business Owners, two original one-acts about the New York gallery scene, took over the now-shuttered bar Luv Story.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” Czerwonko, thirty-seven, said. Nor was he certain where the 2,200 dollars for renting the Luv Story space was coming from. “It was a chaotic mess.”

The model was inspired in part by Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s early days and the storefront theater tradition of Chicago. After graduating from Ohio University’s acting program, Czerwonko had actually first moved to Chicago, but didn’t find the scene he’d idolized quite so active as in its heyday.

Alongside that storefront tradition, he was also inspired by his time at Monomoy Theatre in Cape Cod, a summer stock staple that closed in 2018. It was an all-encompassing kind of training, he recalled: “Shakespeare in the morning, Chekhov in the afternoon, and Once Upon A Mattress at night.”

So formed the guiding ethos of Adult Film: acting as a way of life that demanded total immersion; combined with that “just fucking do it” approach of taking on a huge project, then laying down track as the train was moving.

Aptly, Adult Film’s most ambitious project to date was one of its first: a year-long exploration of Chekhov’s The Seagull in 2023. Czerwonko and his actors were trailed throughout this process by filmmakers Meg Case and Brad Porter, whose resulting documentary Chekhovian (now being shopped to film festivals) traces the near collapse of the fledgling company. Ten performers came and went, some after clashing with Czerwonko. But out of the process came multiple collaborators now integral to Adult Film, including Megan Metrikin, Mia Vallet, and Christopher Jon Martin.

“This doesn’t exist anymore—it’s like 1968 here,” said Martin of the company’s home, where he now also lives in the apartment next door to Czerwonko’s. (They first met at Ohio University years before, when Martin taught Czerwonko as an MFA student.) “It’s basically a giant gym. If you want to come and work out as an actor, this is where you come.”

A heavily tattooed biker who studied with acting guru Kristin Linklater, Martin performed Cowboy Mouth, Sam Shepard and Patti Smith’s absurdist, animalistic deconstruction of the American dream, in the basement opposite Bonifacio, also his girlfriend. During rehearsals he, Bonifacio, and company member AJ Molder formed a punk-folk band, Red and Reckless, that played a concert at the end of each show and now plays frequent gigs.

“Ryan has made a pirate ship, and I actually have a giant one on my back. ” Martin said, noting one of his tattoos. “I like the pirate life. It’s a real fuck-it attitude. We shake the bottle and throw it against the wall. And that’s how you make art. And we want to make a mess of it, because life is messy.”

Still, Chekhovian also provides a glimpse into the insecurity lurking underneath that bravado. Wandering through the woods in Hudson at a crisis moment for the show, Czerwonko is seen muttering to himself sadly: “It seems like I can’t do anything right. Everyone’s ganging up on me. They don’t understand what I’m going for.”

He is doing Konstantin Treplev, of course. But it’s also him. Or, in Czerwonko’s ideal, the two are one and the same.

*

The solution Czerwonko found, when he needed that rent for the Luv Story space, was calling up his acting mentor Maria Dizzia and asking her to teach a class. When that class sold out in just five hours, Czerwonko realized he had a potential model to sustain his company.

“The training center pays for the space, and the plays cover the expenses of what it takes to create them, plus a little profit,” he said. Company administrative work pays 225 dollars a month, while every artist on a production is paid a stipend ranging from 225 to 1,000 dollars depending on the project’s length.

Czerwonko is constantly recruiting new instructors, sometimes from his own acting work. Satter saw the one-act Skedaddle Bar by Joey Merlo, directed by Jack Serio, in the basement of Purgatory, then offered to teach a workshop. Martin specializes in classes like Creating Behavior, inspired by Sanford Meisner and Michael Chekhov. Playwrights Anne Washburn and Lucy Thurber have taught intensives, along with Jack Cummings III, artistic director of Transport Group Theatre Company. The rates are low, comparatively speaking: Martin’s course, an eight-class series, costs 300 dollars, while company member David Garelik’s Dramatic Improv class costs 325 dollars for six classes total.

Garelik is a tough teacher, like Czerwonko, but the actors I observed seem to embrace their bluntness.

“David and Ryan have very different personalities, but they both share an ability to be real with you in a way that does not hurt your feelings,” said Michelle Moriarty, who appeared in Garelik’s production of Where We’re Born, by Lucy Thurber, in the basement.

Before I attended Garelik’s Dramatic Improv class, I emailed him informing him of my plans to attend.

“I will make a few of them cry for your entertainment,” Garelik wrote back, followed by the handshake and kisses emojis. Believing the comment humorous, I responded in kind: “I should hope so…”

But Garelik may not have been kidding. He tended to toss unforgiving comments at his actors mid-scene, declaring choices “boring” or announcing, “You don’t understand what you want!” The improvised scenes had actors drawing upon an emotional recall, something from the actor’s own life to drive the character’s emotions in the moment. While they were not obligated to share this personal recall, a few did in feedback sessions afterwards.

Sabina Sagynbayeva, an astrophysicist who moonlights as an actor, faced a particularly tough feedback session.

“You are making the scene boring,” announced Garelik mid-scene, prompting Sagynbayeva to pace back and forth for a few moments, trying to loosen herself up.

In feedback, he repeated, “I don’t care about the scene,” and said she was, “locked up.” As Sagynbayeva became teary-eyed, I wondered if I was observing Garelik trying to make good on his emailed promise.

“How can we get this,” he said, indicating Sagynbayeva’s eyes welling up, “to exist in a scene?” She nodded in agreement.

I asked Czerwonko about that moment in a later conversation, wondering if it was further than he would personally go.

“No,” he said, noting that Sagynbayeva has been in multiple classes with Garelik, and an instructor knows when some pushing is needed. “I don’t think you can do that with someone unless you’re familiar with them and what they need to move forward.”

This work, he added “is a bunch of people really opening up their whole experience to each other, and it doesn’t feel great all the time. But everyone who comes to our space knows that no one’s gonna hurt them. That’s not what we do.”

Sagynbayeva echoed this sentiment in a later conversation, seemingly a little amused by how startled I had been at the scene.

Garelik “wants to see very pure emotions,” she said. “It becomes this cathartic experience when you reach that kind of emotion that really triggers you. In the end, it feels good—because you feel this surge of adrenaline, but there are no stakes. It’s just acting class. I find it very therapeutic, actually.”

*

Now the company is diving into another treacherous project with their upcoming production of Woyzeck, German playwright Georg Büchner’s influential, unfinished 1836 work, in a venue that hasn’t even opened yet: Modern Sweater, a former sweater factory in the heart of Ridgewood.

Touring the shoddy space with Czerwonko, director Seth Bockley, and the company, that wild “just do it” attitude had never been so palpable.

“The audience will be here,” said Bockley, motioning towards piled up trash in front of a moldy wall. The building’s owner had promised that a ripped-out partition just behind this area will be filled in prior to when performances of Woyzeck are planned to begin this summer.

“I hope we can keep these fluorescents," added Bockley excitedly, indicating the strip lights dangling above, uncovered and wrapped in a mess of stringy wires extending down from all angles. He describes plans for a rising platform at the center of the room, on top of beaten up, mildly warped flooring.

Pacing with arms crossed and back perfectly straight, Czerwonko regarded every corner of the beaten-up space with an excited smile, unperturbed that the venue of his July production looked, on a day in late April, like a bomb just hit it.

Czerwonko paced over to me, grinned, and whispered surreptitiously: “I wish I had this space.”