Ry Humor

At a coffee shop south of the Plaza, writer and actor Ry Kincaid downs a muddy cup of joe as he skims a biography of James Dean, who interests both the writer and the actor in him. In less than an hour, the 26-year-old self-published author of Sexycash tosses around names like Jack Kerouac, Vincent van Gogh and the Marx Brothers. For Kincaid’s generation, these names may not be icons. “I have strange influences I don’t see my peers having,” Kincaid says.

Kincaid, who reads from Sexycash on Thursday night at the Barnes & Noble on Barry Road, grew up in the tony Briarcliff neighborhood. While he was majoring in English at Rockhurst University, he auditioned for a play on a whim. He went on to take a few “goofball roles” before capping his senior year by playing Hamlet.

Sexycash is a collection of humorous pieces (“A Liberal Arts Major Talks About Mathematics”), poetry and a play, in the same vein as writings by Steve Martin or Woody Allen. In the fictional “Postcards of Vincent van Gogh,” Vincent’s brother, Theo, quips, “I know we’re Dutch. But lighten up.”

After graduating in 1999, Kincaid juggled acting and music (he was in a band called Cozmic Taxi) on top of working at a Barnes & Noble and a grocery store. “I was the milk guy you see in the cooler,” he says of the latter. “I wrote a whole screenplay back there in the walk-in cooler. It’s set in a grocery store.”

Though he got a plum role in the Unicorn Theatre’s fall 2001 production of Because He Can and recently played John Travolta in Late Night Theatre’s Scarrie Carrie, Kincaid is restless. “I’m not getting the right parts, so I thought I’d write something for myself,” he says. Included on that list is his yet-to-be-staged play Dumb Show and a one-man show about James Dean, whom he’s researching. What attracts the young writer to Dean is “the myth that he was good-looking, and maybe people didn’t see past that.”

Kincaid admits that his own boyish good looks get in the way of people taking his writing seriously. “Though I’m conscious of looking a certain way — God, I sound like David Cassidy talking — and that people look before being aware of the person, I’ll roll with it. I’m a good writer and a good bass player, and I would do those things before being a model. But I’m not the type of person to go, ‘Oh, you like the way I look? But I’m a good writer.'”

The fact that he had to put out the book himself has nothing to do with the quality of his writing, Kincaid says. “I published this myself, like I’m a band who puts out their own CD and hawks it around to see if a label will pick it up. I could kick Dave Barry’s ass.”