disappeared, never to be recovered. He has often been swept away in a horrifying instant, a moment that can never be forgotten, that will always live in the present but can never be reversed.

Harry, Noon and Night

Harry, Noon and Night, the first of Ribman’s plays to be produced, is set in Munich in 1955, during the American occupation. Each of the three scenes of this black comedy is essentially a confrontation between two people. In the first, Harry, posing as an impossibly inept journalist, is interviewing a thick-witted soldier in a bar while both of them fondle a local prostitute. The interview is a wild, improvisatory put-on; the soldier submits to all of Harry’s addled questions because Harry promises to give him money for the girl when it is over, but the audience never learns Harry’s reason for going through this charade.

In the second scene, the audience meets Immanuel, Harry’s insectlike roommate (and bedmate), in their chaotic, filthy apartment; he is conducting a similar put-on of Harry’s brother Archer, a gung-ho Air Force gunner during the war, now a can-do Ohio businessman. Harry is an artist who has abandoned the sugary, commercial pictorial realism he learned at home in favor of an ugly, inchoate expressionism that he has never succeeded in selling; Archer has come to fetch him home. Immanuel conducts a masterful put-on of Archer, posing alternately, and successfully, as a student of philosophy, a raging queen, and a vendor of religious relics, and befuddling him with fish scales, dry-cleaning fluid, talcum powder, and an overflowing toilet. In the last scene, Harry returns to the apartment to pack his bags to meet Archer at the train station but causes such an uproar—he ties Immanuel up in the bedding and assaults the neighbors—that he is arrested and misses the train.

The plot is as chaotic as Harry’s life and art, but through it, by indirection, the audience begins to see relationships and histories; it is never made clear exactly what Harry’s problem is, or what his youth with Archer was like, but subtly a picture emerges. The one image that emerges most clearly is that of Moko the failure clown, whom Archer had brought Harry to see at the circus; Archer had found him hilarious, but Harry had seen only his pain.

The Journey of the Fifth Horse

One of the clowns in The Journey of the Fifth Horse is Chulkaturin, an impoverished landowner in czarist Russia, whose story is adapted from Ivan Turgenev’s short story “Dnevnik lishnyago cheloveka” (“The Diary of a Superfluous Man”). Dying at the age of twenty-eight, Chulkaturin confides to his diary that he has never really lived, never succeeded in love, or indeed in making any impression at all on other people. Ribman creates another clown as counterpoint to Chulkaturin: Zoditch, the lowly first reader in a publishing house, whose task it is to evaluate the manuscript of Chulkaturin’s diary. As he reads the diary in his miserable rooming house, Chulkaturin’s story comes to life, and Zoditch peoples it with analogous characters from his own loveless, pointless existence. In the end, Zoditch, dripping with scorn for Chulkaturin—especially for those qualities that resemble his own—rejects the manuscript and consigns him to oblivion.

Throughout the play, scenes from Chulkaturin’s diary alternate with scenes from Zoditch’s life and fantasies. This interweaving of plots and levels of reality is quite ingenious, but the technical ingenuity only enhances the pain and ludicrousness of the two protagonists. It is a bittersweet play, its laughter tinged with death. One of its most remarkable aspects is the way Ribman, through his mastery of language, convincingly creates two separate levels of nineteenth century Russian society.

The Ceremony of Innocence

His leap of imagination is even greater in The Ceremony of Innocence. This play was written, in a sense, as a response to the war in Vietnam, but the story that Ribman tells is a fanciful revision of the history of Ethelred the Unready, king of England in the eleventh century. Ribman creates a sense of war as an entity unto itself, with its own momentum and a tenacious hold on the minds and spirits of the people. Ethelred (who is generally seen by historians in a harsher light) is depicted as standing alone for peace, for common prosperity and the spread of literacy, and for justice; appalled at the prejudice and treachery of his court—even his son and his mother—toward the Danes, he simply refuses, as a matter of principle, to take the field at the head of his troops in defense of England.

Ribman begins his play with Ethelred’s refusal to meet with the earls of Sussex and Kent and the bishop of London, who have come to his retreat on the Isle of Wight to importune him to do battle. His refusal seems bullheaded, a bit deranged, and positively untenable—especially in that the subject matter inevitably calls to mind William Shakespeare’s histories, in which the welfare of the English throne is assumed to be the greatest good. The playwright then leaps backward a full year to reveal the underpinnings of Ethelred’s convictions; then he works forward to the last scene, which is set a few hours after the first; and by the end of the play Ribman has managed to justify, both ethically and emotionally, the king’s refusal to lead his country into war even in defense of its borders. Ribman’s achievement is all the more remarkable in that he creates a persuasive language for his characters, a diction that mixes some of the direct, prosaic idiom of modern American speech with Elizabethan locutions—a factitious language that, in less skillful hands, might have come across as clumsy or downright silly, but which Ribman wields into an eloquent sort of poetry.

The Poison Tree

The linguistic audacity of The Poison Tree is very different but no less perilous and no less successful; Ribman sets the play in a prison, for the most part among African American prisoners, and writes for them a number of varieties of black dialect. (A few years earlier, in 1967, another white writer, William Styron, had been excoriated for using black dialect—and, indeed, for daring to imagine the workings of a black man’s mind—in The Confessions of Nat Turner, 1967.) The racism of the white prisoners and guards is a palpable, oppressive force throughout the play, but it is only one of a number of oppressions wearing away at the souls of prisoners and guards alike.

The play begins with the murder of a white guard by a black prisoner. The victim, his neck snapped, falls into the arms of another guard, Di Santis. He becomes obsessed with the senseless loss of his comrade, and, through direct violence and covert manipulation, he wreaks a terrible vengeance on the innocent as well as on the guilty. In the end, though, the tables are turned again, and the victimizer becomes the victim.

Cold Storage

In Cold Storage, Ribman’s most successful play commercially, the language is very close to his own natural speech: that of modern New York. In technique, it is his most realistic, straightforward play. It dares, though, to forge snappy comedy from a situation of inevitable catastrophe; set on the roof garden of a hospital, it presents the relationship between two patients: an old man who is dying and a prosperous middle-aged designer who may have cancer.

Buck

Buck, also set in modern New York, is somewhat more complex stylistically. It concerns a television director who is hired to make sleazy exploitation tapes for a cable channel but gets so involved in trying to create a true picture of the realities he is restaging that the scenes he films take on a life of their own.

Sweet Table at the Richelieu

Sweet Table at the Richelieu is set in a mysterious, elegant spa in an unspecified (though probably Germanic) corner of Europe. It consists of nothing but an after-dinner conversation among the guests; the guests, however, are a most curious, nightmarish assemblage of Eurotrash, and the discussion is brutal, feral, flaying—more direct, probing, and yet poetical than any real-life chitchat could ever be. Among the guests are a widowed baroness avid to enforce the prerogatives of her rank despite the humiliations of a more democratic age; a half-man, half-beast clairvoyant; an American author of best-selling pulp novels and her lover, a Moroccan given to violent fantasies; and a French Lothario who constantly humiliates his wife, who is always hanging on his neck. The presiding figure is Dr. Atmos, a cheerful but treacherous unlicensed physician who attracts guests to the Richelieu with promises of eternal youth.

The central character, Jeanine Cendrars, is a Pennsylvania woman who speaks very little. Early in the play, the audience learns that her marriage is in trouble, and toward the end Dr. Atmos, who dabbles in psychology as well as in rejuvenation, reveals to all that she is haunted by the loss of a child who was swept from her side on a boat by a wave during a moment of inattention. Although the other characters are intent on obliterating their pasts, Jeanine clings tenaciously to the image of her lost child, keeping him alive in her mind. In fact, the entire play can be seen as an emanation of her mind, and all the other characters as dream-figures brought to palpable form as combatants in her struggle with a tragic past that remains ever present.

The Cannibal Masque and A Serpent’s Egg are one-act plays that were conceived to form a trilogy with Sweet Table at the Richelieu. Each of the three plays has for its central image people eating: In Sweet Table at the Richelieu, a cornucopia of sweets from a groaning board; in The Cannibal Masque, a fat pork dinner in the midst of a famine in Bavaria in 1923; and in A Serpent’s Egg (set some thirty years later), a skimpy picnic on a German mountainside under the greedy eye of a rapacious landowner. Although the longer play deals with excess through luxuriant verbiage, the one-acts are spare and parabolic, like little allegories of inhuman victimization, but each with a sudden shift of fortunes.

Though there are similarities with Sweet Table at the Richelieu, the other plays in the trilogy are very different in form and feel. Indeed, one of the most curious aspects of Ribman’s playwriting career is its diversity, the breadth of imagination that puts him into so many different times, places, idioms, and styles. “I think of Keats,” he has said, “who likened a career to the sun which gradually rises, reaches its zenith, and gradually sets. A playwright produces a body of work—he doesn’t just produce one or two plays—because what he’s doing is mining his life, and a life encompasses more than one or two plays.”

The Rug Merchants of Chaos

Ribman’s oft used themes are present in The Rug Merchants of Chaos. The play is a comedy about a couple who are engaged in questionable business endeavors over the years. Although constantly on the edge of catastrophe, they manage to avoid a downfall through sheer chance.