American author, poet and playwright (born 1932)
Ronald Burt Ribman (born May 28, 1932) is an American author, poet and playwright.
"As poet-playwright, Ronald Ribman has, throughout thirty years of writing, confronted the questions of what is man's and what is God's role, if any, in man's behavior. Suffusing his work are anger and satire, more often sorrow and haunting mystery, but always the mocking spirit of the grotesque behind the action, be it commonplace or exalted. Ribman's plays consistently reveal man's universe as abandoned by God but inextricably webbed into His rules, rules only hinted at as boundless in range and consequence. A corrosive absurdity at the heart of tragedy.
"With such infinite possibilities left to human ordering, Mr. Ribman"s people have created many worlds in a great many plays with landscapes both familiar and abstractly bizarre. In these plays reality is created anew each time by characters whose capacity for myth making is prodigious and whose anguish at recognizing the recycled essence of their illusions is profound. 
"Ronald Ribman makes time his ally but erases the arbitrary categories of past, present, and future. What is, has been, what was remains. His creation of various modes of reality demands that he collapse all history into the immediate moment. No matter on which century he lifts the curtain, he sees the mutual embrace of lunacy and reason, cruelty and compassion, innocence and cunning. And always he hears the sounds of mordant laughter, the fool's malicious jests couched in paradox, the cries of pain and astonishment at the confidence man's swift manipulations of certainties into illusions, and the sighs of the weak yearning for the seats of the powerful. The transformed realities that emerge in his theater cling to us, embrace us, invade our secret places of self-knowing." Arthur Hagadus, "American Theatre", July/August 1987
"Ronald Ribman...has been developing quietly, methodically and meticulously into one of the most haunting dramatic poets our stage has ever seen." Robert Brustein, "Who Needs Theatre", p. 109
Biography.
Ribman was born in Sydenham Hospital in New York City to Samuel M. Ribman, a lawyer, and Rosa (Lerner) Ribman. He attended public school in Brooklyn, and graduated P.S. 188 in 1944. Ribman attended Mark Twain Jr. High School, graduating in 1947, and Abraham Lincoln H.S., graduating in 1950. Ribman is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1954, his master's degree in 1958, and his Ph.D. in 1962. In August 1967, he married Alice Rosen, a registered nurse. The Ribmans have two children, James and Elana.
Ribman served in the United States Army from 1954 to 1956. Following his military service, Ribman worked as a coal broker for the J.E. Ribman Coal Co of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, from 1956 to 1957. Ribman was an assistant professor of English Literature at Otterbein College from 1962 to 1963, and left academia to focus on his plays in 1964 to the present.
Literature.
Ribman's poetry first appeared in literary magazines as "The Beloit Poetry Journal" and "The Colorado Quarterly". Ribman's first commercial publication was an article, co-authored with his father, in the April 1964 issue of "Harper's Magazine", titled "The Poor Man in the Scales," a study of the problems faced by indigent defendants in the federal courts. Ribman's most famous early play, "The Journey of the Fifth Horse" based on Ivan Turgenev's short story "The Diary of a Superfluous Man," won an Obie Award and starred a young Dustin Hoffman in the role of Zoditch.
Awards and fellowships.
In 1975, Ribman was honored by the Rockefeller Foundation with a Playwright-In-Residence fellowship for sustained contribution to American Theater.
In 1983, Ribman's play "Cold Storage" was chosen to be staged by Classic Theater International at the Hague, Netherlands to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the establishment of Dutch-American diplomatic relations. Subsequently a luncheon in his honor was held at the American embassy.
Critical commentary and analysis.
After the American Repertory Theater's world premier of Ribman's "Sweet Table at the Richelieu", Jonathan Marks identified a central theme in Ribman's work as having "a preoccupation with the persistence of the past in the present—a recognition that we all carry with us a heavy baggage of seeds, each of which began sprouting at a different time in the past, and never stopped shooting out tendrils: a bag of memories which can never be simply dumped."
Bibliography and further commentary.
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 ·Starr, Bernard (August 4, 2016) "Famed Playwright Switches Genres. Interview With Ronald Ribman About His New Novel, Infinite Absence" Huffington Post.
References and notes.
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