Ronald Ribman

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 Provided by Wikipedia