Two men are on the rooftop garden of a hospital in Manhattan. One is an Armenian grocer. He has cancer and a big mouth. The other is an art dealer, a self-loathing Holocaust survivor who also has cancer and is tired of his own voice. In between medical procedures, they bicker about the quagmire of the past.
“You came out a big winner,” the grocer says.
“Because I survived?” the art dealer says. “It doesn’t feel like a triumph.”
“That’s because nothing we ever do feels like a triumph, because the mind’s a piece of garbage,” the grocer replies. “It’s never happy with what we do for it. I once took my mind down to Barbados for two weeks, and you know what it said to me? ‘You should have taken us to Jamaica!’”
The verbal jousting took place in “Cold Storage,” a 1977 play staged at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway and written by Ronald Ribman, a mordantly funny playwright whose frequently surreal works grappled with God’s impatience, the past’s invasion of the present and, as he once put it, “a person’s right to fail as a human being.”
In “Harry, Noon and Night,” a 1965 Off Broadway production set in postwar Munich, Dustin Hoffman played a gay Nazi with a hunchback who quarrels with his roommate, a disturbed American painter who believes a caterpillar gave him syphilis. “The Journey of the Fifth Horse” (1966), also Off Broadway, was based in part on Ivan Turgenev’s short story “The Diary of a Superfluous Man,” and starred Mr. Hoffman as an editor at a publishing house who rejects a posthumous memoir by a 19th-century landowner who died friendless and broke. In “The Poison Tree” (1973), inmates and guards battle over the moral high ground in prison.
“All my characters are crying out against the universe they can’t alter,” Mr. Ribman said in a 1997 interview with the novelist Anne Roiphe published in The New York Times. “They are battling against an unseen and always victorious enemy, and they go on battling.”
Mr. Ribman died on May 15 in Dallas at 92. His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son, Jamie.
During his nearly three-decade career, Mr. Ribman’s plays were staged at the American Place Theater in Hell’s Kitchen, the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, Conn., and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. As a playwright, he was often overlooked relative to his contemporaries like Edward Albee, Sam Shepard and David Mamet.
Writing in Vogue, the critic Martin Gottfried called him “a major playwright who should be nationally celebrated.” Another critic, Robert Brustein, wrote in The New Republic in 1966 that Mr. Ribman had “substantial literary gifts and a fine instinct for the stage, and I’m astonished that this has not been more noted and acclaimed.”
Mr. Ribman’s reputation as a writer’s writer was inextricably linked to his subjects and his style.
Unlike playwrights who draw on their upbringings to create intimate, soaring dramas of middle-class life, Mr. Ribman set his frequently neurotic characters in bleak, morally ambiguous situations where laughter, as he put it, “is a measure of the sickness of society.”
His works were also verbose and light on action.
“My plays are about words,” he told The Times in 1970. “The trouble is that in this age people go to see a play. Three hundred years ago, they didn’t go to see a play. They went to hear a play. And there is a subtle difference in that. People went to the theater, and they listened to the language, and the language created the visual thing for them.”
Mr. Ribman — who was never rich but also never poor — was content not to write for the masses.
“The man who gives them what they want is the man who will be rich and famous,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1989. “I don’t, so I’m not. My danger as a writer is that I see where the golden calf is. I just don’t want to go there.”
Ronald Burt Ribman was born on May 28, 1932, in Manhattan and grew up in Brooklyn. His father, Samuel, had multiple jobs during the Great Depression, including fireman, Coca-Cola salesman and coal dealer. His mother, Rosa (Lerner) Ribman, was a stenographer.
Ronald was a self-described terrible student.
“Usually I was in the dumb class,” he told Ms. Roiphe. “I never read anything. I worked at 80 different kid jobs — on pinball alleys, renting beach chairs. I fought in gang wars. My grades were terrible.”
Somehow, he was accepted at Brooklyn College.
“But they told me I was the bottom of the class, hanging in there by my fingernails,” he said. “I went to this aptitude testing service, and they said I should write, do something with English. I laughed at them. English was my absolutely worst subject. I wanted to be a chemist.”
Facing economic struggles, the family moved to Jonestown, Pa., where his father sold coal. Ronald enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh, earning a bachelor’s degree in business. In 1952, he was drafted into the Army.
“He started writing letters to his parents, and the letters got longer and longer,” Mr. Ribman’s son said in an interview. “Then the letters turned into poems, and the poems turned into short stories, and the short stories started turning into plays.”
Returning to Pennsylvania in 1956 after his service was completed, Mr. Ribman received master’s and doctoral degrees in English from the University of Pittsburgh. He taught at Oberlin College in Ohio, but he didn’t enjoy it. One day, he later recalled, he saw a production of Edward Albee’s play “The Sandbox” and thought, “I can do better than that.” So he began writing plays. “Harry, Noon and Night,” his first, had its premiere at the American Place Theater, followed by a run at the Pocket Theater in the East Village with Robert Blake in the title role.
Critics were flummoxed.
“You want me to tell you what it’s about?” George Oppenheimer wrote in Newsday. “I’m sorry. I’ll be all right in a moment. I just can’t help laughing and laughing at the thought that you want me to tell you what it’s about.”
Mr. Ribman’s reviews improved with “The Journey of the Fifth Horse,” which won an Obie Award. “The Poison Tree” won the Straw Hat Award, for excellence in summer theater. “Cold Storage” was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. “Buck” (1984), a satire of cable television, won the Playwrights USA Award.
Mr. Ribman married Alice Rosen in 1967. In addition to their son, she survives him, as do their daughter, Elana Ribman, and four grandchildren.
Before moving to California and later to Dallas, Mr. Ribman lived for many years on the Upper West Side. In 1970, the cultural critic John Gruen visited him at his apartment for a feature article in The Times.
“By no stretch of the imagination can Ronald Ribman be called a fashionable playwright,” Mr. Gruen wrote. “In fact, as personalities go, Ribman seems singularly devoid of magnetism or even charm.”
There were no pictures on the walls, no flowers or plants.
“And yet,” Mr. Gruen wrote, “this seeming lack of sophistication finally produces the image of a playwright determined to play no one’s game but his own.”
Mr. Ribman said the people in the audience were his only concern.
“I want them to lose the sense that there is somebody sitting next to them, that they are in a theater,” he said. “I want their minds to go blotto on their egos, and move from that, mentally, onto the stage — and become involved with what is happening there, and to enter into my world.”
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