Ferrying on the Styx

By T.E.K.

COLD STORAGE by RONALD RIBMAN

One third of any given Ronald Ribman play seems to have been typed on a missing ribbon. It makes him a tantalizing dramatist whose characters are like stripteasers of the mind; they fling off humor, eloquence and poetry but cannot openly discard some essential inner aspect of their being.

There may be a mystical streak in this young playwright, but the stage is mighty barren soil for mysticism. He is certainly haunted by the long scorching annals of the Jewish experience, to which Ribman ascribes survival with suffering in a mixture too complex for revelation. His social canvas is like that of a Talmudic scholar taking a wry inventory of the sustained mockery of human existence.

In Cold Storage, now at Manhattan's American Place Theater, Ribman's Talmudic scholar is an old, self-educated Armenian greengrocer, Joseph Parmigian (Martin Balsam). He is dying of cancer in a New York hospital yet he has the juices of a Middle East Falstaff flowing in him, and he knows that none die with honor except those who laugh at fate.

He is joined by a prissy, middle-aged art connoisseur and dealer, Richard Landau (Michael Lipton), who has come in for an "exploratory." This is about as comforting to Landau as seeing Charon beckon for the ferry ride across the Styx. What Parmigian tries to do is to summon up in him the image of man's courage in extremity. This image is buried in Landau's boyhood memories when he saw an old Jew (Paul Sparer) rounded up by the Nazis.

As a philosopher-jester, Balsam gives one of those performances that do more than win prizes; they establish the highest bench marks of acting. Discoursing richly and ironically on life and death, he becomes a fabulous invalid who, like the theater itself, is an image for the tenacity of man's spirit. T.E.K.

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