Word: ribman
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...first work in the ART's series, The End of the World with Symposium to Follow by Arthur Kopit, was a recent Broadway flop inexplicably revived so that it could make an even more spectacular belly-flop here in Cambridge. Now Ronald Ribman, author of a number of underproduced plays, gets his chance to bore audiences with a work that is pretentious, muddily written, and as meaningful as a Spam commercial...
Sweettable is not a complete disaster; Ribman is a smart guy, and there are many good ideas and clever chunks of writing in this work. The superb cast and designers work hard to bring out the best of this dramatic turnip, and damned if they don't squeeze out a little dramatic blood--but it's sweated drop by drop from the brows of the actors...
...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...