Ronald Ribman

Ronald Ribman’s plays have been called remarkable, wildly unique and written with a maniacal ferocity, defiant of category, striking in their eclecticism and many-sided portrayal of the human comedy.

In recognition of his “sustained contribution to American Theater” he has been honored by The Rockefeller Foundation, The Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. His numerous awards include an Obie Award for Best Play: The Journey of the Fifth Horse; an Emmy Nomination for Outstanding Writing Achievement in Drama: The Final War of Olly Winter; the Playwrights USA Award for Buck; the Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for Cold Storage.

After the American Repertory Theater’s world premier of Ribman’s Sweet Table at the Richelieu, Jonathan Marks noted a central theme in the playwright’s work, that “What reveals itself repeatedly, throughout his work, is 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."