Cold Storage: A Play

I was honored to tour Europe in a production of Ronald Ribman’s wonderful play, Cold Storage.  

Parmigian is one of my all-time favorite characters.  I loved spending time with him and hope to do so again shortly.  I was thrilled by the reception to the production.  

Some thoughts I had when preparing the role:  

- To live in the past is to lose.  No battle can be won in the part that is already lost.  No prior decision can be reversed.  A negative, horrible past cannot be made positive but it can be made useful.  It can fortify us and help us win in the present and the future.

- As long as he can find, discover and reveal new truths he can feed, sustain and fortify himself, carry on with his work and hold this horrible disease at bay.  He has learned not to expect a return on anything except what he put into himself.  Life can only be as rich, fruitful and enlightening as the extent to which you have educated and enriched your mind and your heart. 

- Permanency is the sum of what has gone before and brought forward to the present to be used constructively.  Permanency is thought, feeling and experience converted to action.  By allowing ourselves to be victimized we become the perpetrators of our own misery and destruction. 

- There is no going back.  You must live for purpose and conviction.  To live is to believe  To disbelieve is regret, frustration, doubt, insecurity and death.  To be above the battle is to be cowardly, purposeless, or pedestrian.

- Most important, he must rail, rail against the impending darkness; rail against the spectre of death; rail against every attempt to take away his dignity and self-esteem.

Ronald Ribman is an American author, poet and playwright.  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 Dramatist’s Guild’s Hull- Warriner Award and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for Cold Storage.