Stage:

...So there is hope for Buck...

...Although the works of any dramatist have strong family resemblances, every play creates its own artistic problems, the solutions to which-or the failed solutions to which-give that play its shape, its substance, its force...

...But there is already much of value in the script, on the stage...

...GERALD WEALESLD WEALES...

...It is disappointing, which is seldom fatal in Ribman's case (except commercially), for his plays become more substantial with each return to them, their eccentricities turning nicely into the theatrical metaphor they always were...

...Though you would not have it...

...and a broken-hearted Kent answers, "Yes...

...I found myself thinking of the moment in A Ceremony of Innocence when Ethelred cries out, "Is this world a dungeon wherein men in their chains strike one another...

...Buck is everything Cold Storage is not: sprawling, uncertain, filled with grotesque and multiple layers of theatrical action, more abrasive than funny, its lyricism often in danger of becoming a whimper...

...this last leads to two versions of the same murderous event, one porn parody, the other an almost realistic attempt to understand the victim, neither likely to provide the truth of the situation...

...Buck's problem is that he has become distressed with what he is doing, a dehumanization that reduces complex beings to fragments -the sexual parts-and robs the crimes of any social context...

...The protagonist-the Buck of the title-is an up-from-porno-films producer who works for a cable television company founded as a money laundry for gangsters who have discovered that crisply-packaged sex and violence makes it a money tree instead...

...It is a belief that he has often expressed before...

...It was so rich, so joyous, so exuberantly controlled that we Ribman true believers sat on the edge of our chairs for six rump-sprung years waiting for him to top that one, to unveil his new splendor...

...Their product, the fruit of Buck's artistic vision, is the dramatization of famous murders, done with the subtlety of sadistic erotic cartoons and made on the cheap since the performers are real derelicts, drifters, loners who have been dragged in off the streets to play similar characters on screen...

...it is probably not even desirable...

...This is not possible...

...Buck was played almost realistically by Alan Rosenberg...

...It also reminds us of the string of weak and ineffectual plays he turned out in the last few years and his paranoia about critics-all of whom, he was convinced, were out to get him...

...Stage BUCK STOPS HERE NEW PLAY FROM RONALD RIBMAN THE DEATH of Tennessee Williams reminds us-as if that were necessary-of how many fine plays he wrote and of how important they were to the postwar American theater...

...but...

...The last moments of the play find the cameraman, about to venture out into winter weather, searching for his rubbers...

...They also provide a useful lead-in to Ronald Ribman, one of our best and least appreciated dramatists, and his new play, Buck...

...Most of the time, he was an isolated believable person on a field of caricature...

...Buck, sitting alone, says, "It's a wonder it bothers to fall at all...

...He screams instructions to his lawyer to tell them to make it possible for him to see his child or he will kill them...

...He last had a play in New York in 1977 - Cold Storage, that triumphant comedy set in a terminal ward...

...We should have known better, for Ribman, even more than Williams, moves with each play into a new setting, a new idiom, although he drags his familiar dark themes with him and his passion for language...

...After all the snow does bother to fall...

...These ruminations on Williams, death, time and the fact that the playwright, like the Gypsy's daughter at the full moon in Camino Real, becomes a virgin again with each new play, are meant as celebratory for Tennessee Williams...

...He tries to insert explanatory narrative, political motivation, sympathetic re-creation of character...

...24) and the New York Times (Mar...

...Ribman said in interviews in Other Stages (Feb...

...Or, at least, "Yes...

...It would be a nice irony if time proved that those of us who felt that "seems" at Something Cloudy were wrong and Lanford Wilson, who cried at it, was right, but for now we can all mourn the dead artist and be thankful for the remarkable work he has left us...

...the performers, toward whom he feels protective, continue to be abused by his colleagues...

...Although I assume that this was intentional-the line between reality and fiction disappearing as actual and pretended violence and vulgarity become the same-it lacked clarity on stage, an intellectual point without dramatic validity...

...and, as far as we can see, he has no chance to be the father he dreams of being...

...Buck's discontent comes from his growing sense of the potential killer in himself, presented comically in the department-store scene in which, hunting arrow in hand, he dreams of bringing down a rug, and more seriously in the off-stage story of his ex-wife and her new . husband, who despite court rulings keep him from seeing his son...

...Besides, Ribman is a playwright, like Williams, for whom a first production can be a step to a later, surer version of the work, as both The Poison Tree and Cold Storage indicate...

...In the production at the American Place Theater, it was difficult to decide which effects were Ribman's and which belonged to the director, Elinor Renfield...

...In this play, as in most of his plays, Ribman is dealing with the terrifying forces of a world in which man's best impulses are defeated, in which it is difficult to tell the victims from the victimizers, in which varying ways of seeing, color reality...

...The gangster figures, larger-than-life black and Jewish stereotypes, seemed closer to the enforcers in Joseph Papp's idea of Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class than to wonderfully outrageous Ribman inspirations like Immanuel in Harry, Noon and Night and Zoditch in The Journey of the Fifth Horse...

...There was no qualitative or presentational difference between the cartoon scenes being filmed and the cartoon scenes played among the filmers...

...With the life-in-death ending of Cold Storage still warm in my memory, let me allow Ribman to answer, "No...

...The difficulty is that the admirers of a man's work-and in Williams's case they are legion-always expect that the new play will be even better than the last...

...Buck reminds him that the new-fallen snow will be beautiful as he walks home, and the cameraman says that by morning it will be dirty, ugly, have turned to shit...

...The difficulty with Something Cloudy, Something Clear is not that it is not A Streetcar Named Desire, but that it seems insufficient on its own terms...

...only occasionally- personal exchanges between Buck and the cynical cameraman, a confessional appeal from a sex club performer longing to go legit-did other characters approach this style...

...This is especially true once one gets past the surface subject matter that so often confuses critics and occasionally the playwright himself...

...Buck is no more a satire on cable television than The Poison Tree is a prison problem play...

...In the end, the gangsters control the product...

...6) that he sees the play as a positive statement, an indication of the necessity of continuing to fight against the victorious forces of darkness...