COLD STORAGE

Dramatist’s Guild’s Hull-Warriner Award, 1976-1977

Pulitzer Prize Nomination in Drama, 1978

“A beautifully detailed comedy celebrating the miraculous, irreducible essence of life in the face of death.” — Jack Kroll, Newsweek

“Rollicking with gallows humor and verve. The acting is superlative! One of Ronald Ribman’s best plays, just possibly his very best!” — Clive Barnes, The New York Times

“Ronald Ribman is one of America’s best young stage writers…an authentic poetic voice.” — Martin Gottfried, New York Post

“A winner! A rib-tickling, healthy comedy! Unusual, thoughtful and exhilarating theatre!” — Douglas Watt, The New York Daily News

“A dazzling tour-de-force.” — Glenne Curry, UPI

“A marvelous play! The writing is superb!” — Howard Kissel, Women’s Wear Daily

“I had never realized that Ribman, who is a serious dramatist, could be so funny. Cold Storage is written with craft and humor.” — Edith Oliver, The New Yorker

“Humor and eloquence! A wry inventory of the sustained mockery of human existence.” — Ted Kalstrong, Time Magazine

Story: The rooftop of a Manhattan hospital. Parmigian is dying. “And it is not that this grizzled Armenian fruit dealer is simply dying. He is concentrating his entire and considerable vitality upon the subject. He knows its details: the endless leaking of life and dignity out of new and more horrible incisions. He knows its humiliations: bedpans, helplessness and the condescension of nurses. He knows its terror: silence and oblivion. And he knows its opportunity: the chance to send his mind skyrocketing on a last loopy flight, unrestrained by the kind of reasonableness necessary to those who are going to be out and about in a week or two.” — Richard Eder, The New York Times

Sample Excerpt:

LANDAU

How glib you are. I listened to you all afternoon going on and on as if you knew something that was worth all those words, and all I could think about was how every sound I make is unpleasant to me, how much I’ve grown to hate the sound of my own voice. I’m tired of being a man. Tired of putting on my clothes in the morning. Tired of taking them off at night. Tired of turning on the gas to broil a piece of meat and standing there with the match in my hand, watching it burn down till it scorches my fingers, forgetting what it was I came there to do. And nothing of this has anything to do with you.

PARMIGIAN

That’s absolutely true. That’s why you should talk to me. I can give you a hundred percent objective opinion. That’s what every Jew needs. A one hundred percent objective opinion from Armenia.

LANDAU

I don’t need any opinions from you or anyone else.

PARMIGIAN

Excuse me, Landau. In my opinion I never met anyone who needed more opinions than you do. You remind me of a man with a club foot who tells everybody he’s got a ballet slipper on his foot. Which reminds me of something in my dream with the King of Bavaria and his wife. In the dream for some strange reason I have turned myself into a hunchback. I walk around with a big hump on my back. What do you think about this?

LANDAU

Nothing!

PARMIGIAN

Another “nothing” from the master of “nothing.” What’s the matter, Landau, don’t you see the similarity between our two cases? You with your club foot and me with my hump?

LANDAU

What similarity? There is no similarity! You just invented that! You just gave yourself a hump on the back when you decided to give me a club foot! You never dreamed you were a humpback until you decided I had a club foot! (Landau turns and walks away from him)

PARMIGIAN

Landau?

LANDAU

What?

PARMIGIAN

You came out a winner. You came out a big winner.

LANDAU

Why? Because I survived? Is that what makes me a big winner?

PARMIGIAN

You not only survived, Landau, you triumphed! A boy with no education turns himself into a man who can almost tell the difference between a Van der Heyden, whatever that is, and a Pieter Brueghel. A boy dropped down in the middle of Portugal alone ends up in America with a wife, two children, and a ten-speed bike. This is a triumph, Landau. A triumph!

LANDAU

It doesn’t feel like a triumph.

PARMIGIAN

That’s because nothing we ever do feels like a triumph, because the mind’s a piece of garbage. 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!” So don’t wait around for thanks from it. I’ll let you in on a little secret. The real reason Adam and Eve got thrown out of the Garden of Eden had nothing to do with a piece of fruit, because there’s nothing wrong with a piece of fruit, it’s a good laxative. What is was, was that God finally got tired waiting around for thanks from the human brain. He said, “If I have to wait around for thanks, I’m going to die of old age. So screw it, and while I’m thinking about it, screw them!”

LANDAU

I thought you didn’t believe in God?

PARMIGIAN

When did I say that?

LANDAU

A few minutes ago, right after you got done talking about pomegranates or plantains or whatever it was!

PARMIGIAN

Who remember what I said a few minutes ago? Why do you live in the past?

Available At:

http://www.amazon.com/Cold-storage-new-play-acts/dp/0573607516
http://www.samuelfrench.com/p/8945/cold-storage
*Original first editions also often found through eBay and Coming Soon in eBook.