Ronald Ribman's Journey
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Ronald Ribman's Journey The new play at the American Place Theater multiplies Turgenev by Gogol by Ronald Ribman. The product. The Journey of the Fifth Horse, is...
...He offers to marry a girl whom he loves and who is pregnant by another man...
...Larry Arrick's direction fixes the play's ironies in sharp physical images, both the general picture of Zoditch looming over Chulkaturin's mishaps like an overcast sky, and the separate scenes: Zoditch proposing a spiritual union while his landlady shoves lumps of meat through a grinder...
...a bird of prey picking distastefully at a decent man's past...
...He embodies absolutely Ribman's visions of a Napoleon of bureaucrats...
...Michael Tolan's Chulkaturin indicates little of the "leprous" effect the character says he has on others...
...I reject you I am loved...
...a staid businessman caught guiltily, his hand in a bullfinch's cage, trying to flutter its feathers and determine its sex...
...a prospector among the platitudes who at last unearths the terrible, obvious truth that he has become his own victim...
...On reaching a description of some medical treatment, he announces, "The public is not interested in suffering, Chulkaturin...
...But as Zoditch, Dustin Hoffman (who played superbly in Ribman's Harry, Noon and Night) uncannily matches the shifting lines of his role, spoken and structural...
...Where is the punctuation...
...Ribman has plucked him whole out of Turgenev...
...His isolation, unlike Chulkaturin's, is self-imposed...
...He wears a stifflybuttoned suit (the same color as Chulkaturin's), thick-lensed glasses, and an aggressive little mustache...
...Chulkaturin, a landowner, is an effete, considerate soul...
...Most of the actors are middling...
...she does not want him...
...he exists as "an interruption in people's conversation...
...While he is dying, his housekeeper persuades him that he has no further use for his clothes, and snatches them from his closet...
...It allows Arrick to winnow out Zoditch's life from his imaginings, from Chulkaturin's narrative and, the farthest extension of the play, from Chulkaturin's memory soliloquies...
...For the dreamlike confrontation, Arrick brings Zoditch to the lowest level of the stage so that Chulkaturin can point down at him...
...And after he finishes the diary he smashes at it with a pencil, crying, "I reject your manuscript...
...He lies to himself and evasively resents Chulkaturin's attempts in the diary to be honest...
...This when his landlady-in real life, not fantasyhas just laughed down his proposal of marriage...
...Zoditch is Ribman's own work, although he is virtually an amplification of one of Gogol's malicious clerks in, say, The Overcoat or The Diary of a Madman...
...Suspecting that mingling with others means giving of oneself, he hoards himself in a dingy boarding house room where he indulges in such fantasies as a sexual assault on his person by his buxom landlady...
...as she goes out he reminds her not to empty soapy water into a stream on his estate for fear of killing the fish...
...His voice has trouble getting free of his nose...
...When he reads its first few lines he complains about the tiny writing, "the hand of a pygmy, backward, feminine...
...He is small and vain ("It is a medical fact that the short man has his heart closer to his brain for a quicker supply of blood"), miserly ("I live close to the bone"), pretentious ("I am a man of sentiment, to be respected"), and envious of the world ("I could have been an officer, a captain: I had no one to speak for me...
...As personalities, though, the two men are polar opposites, and it is this similarity-incontrast that detonates the play's energies...
...and on to the momentary confrontation at the end, when Zoditch imagines Chulkaturin's apparition lift an arm at him-in accusation, scorn, sympathy, or leavetaking?-and disappear...
...In company, his bashful presence dries up the talk around him...
...Ribman's plot takes Zoditch through the incidents in the diary and forces on him a discomfiting parallel between his life and that of the diary's dead author, Chulkaturin...
...He must have put it all at the end.' He shakes the script to see if any loose punctuation will fall out...
...Kert Lundell's set, badly underlit at times by Roger Morgan, is a clever complication of stairways, ramps and boards, climbing to Zoditch's platform-room at the rear...
...The Journey of the Fifth Horse, is an impudent, closely packed comedy, as accomplished an American literary drama as The Last Analysis or The Skin of Our Teeth, neither of which it resembles in the least...
...There is no other ending...
...He snarls, "You ass," while Chulkaturin is exulting in a remembered love affair...
...A manuscript, actually Turgenev's The Diary of a Superfluous Man, comes into the hands of a publisher's reader, Zoditch, in 19thcentury Petersburg...
Vol. 49 • May 1966 • No. 10
