Ronald Ribman, 92, Dies; His Plays Mined the Absurdity of Existence

New York Times

13 hours ago

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.
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