Word: ribman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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COLD STORAGE by RONALD RIBMAN...
...third of any given Ronald Ribman play seems to have been typed on a missing ribbon. It makes him a tantalizing dramatist whose characters are like stripteasers of the mind; they fling off humor, eloquence and poetry but cannot openly discard some essential inner aspect of their being...
There may be a mystical streak in this young playwright, but the stage is mighty barren soil for mysticism. He is certainly haunted by the long scorching annals of the Jewish experience, to which Ribman ascribes survival with suffering in a mixture too complex for revelation. His social canvas is like that of a Talmudic scholar taking a wry inventory of the sustained mockery of human existence...
...Cold Storage, now at Manhattan's American Place Theater, Ribman's Talmudic scholar is an old, self-educated Armenian greengrocer, Joseph Parmigian (Martin Balsam). He is dying of cancer in a New York hospital yet he has the juices of a Middle East Falstaff flowing in him, and he knows that none die with honor except those who laugh at fate...
...these two slight offerings, Ronald Ribman's is the slighter. He has kept whatever he wanted to say in Fingernails Blue as Flowers so skillfully concealed as to make it the dramatic equivalent of the perfect crime. At a guess, its Jamaica resort-hotel setting and tycoon hero stand for the sappingly corruptive effect of the affluent society on all stages and ages...