Word: ribman
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...world is dark, lonely, and savage. God is "a cold shadow," as we are informed by the surly protagonist, who moans he "could have forgiven Him for everything but not existing." Painfully maudlin commentary unfortunately comprises the bulk of this ill-fated production of Ronald Ribman's Dream of the Red Spider. If only it had been written with a sense of humor or perspective, maybe this play would have been tolerable. But the overblown dialogue, sparse plot, and half-hearted acting make this performance dull, dull, dull...
...finally, for the very fact that it was made. Despite his widespread acclaim (and a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976), Saul Bellow has never before had a novel turned into a film. It is hard to imagine anyone doing a better job. The adaptation, written by Ronald Ribman and directed by Fielder Cook, takes a few careful liberties with Bellow's story but packs its essence into a compact, ruefully funny and tensely moving 90 minutes. In odd but inspired casting, Robin Williams plays Tommy and delivers the best dramatic performance of his career. In past roles, Williams...
...imagine a hypothetical moment during the rehearsals of Sweet Table at the Richelieu, Serban's latest with the A.R.T., when playwright Ronald Ribman offers a comment from the corner and Serban jumps a foot into the air with fright. The result of his first collaboration with a pre-immortal is a production that is far more textually-oriented than the followers of Serban and the A.R.T. are accustomed, presented with a restrained staging that supports the material, infusing it, as the stage is supposed to do, with life...
...Ribman, the author of Journey of the Fifth Horse and Cold Storage, has conjured up the Richelieu, a baroque spa somewhere in the mountains of Europe, and he has populated it with a selection of guests who have the cultural and ethnic diversity of a World War II movie bomber crew: the French gigolo; the Levantine low-life; Mimosa Klein, the Jewish poet from Wellesley; and more, including Cesare Bottivicci, the Italian mutant prognosticator. The physical and emotional excess of these characters matches their surroundings, particularly the immense sweet table itself, laden with creamy goodies and attended by bewigged...
...PLAY is far from perfect. There are long stretches of dialogue where Ribman replaces invention with swatches of poetic mish-mash; and there is one character, a Mrs. Karras, who cannot have any other reason for existing except to provide a contracted actress with a job for the evening. And in a few instances Serban gives in to the urge to be maddeningly and incongruously ambiguous, as when he has two characters enter from a glowing portal set in a huge tapestry depicting a boar hunt. You think of the Juniper Tree rhinoceri and shake your head...