"With such infinite possibilities left to human ordering, Mr. Ribman"s people have created many worlds in a great many plays with landscapes both familiar and abstractly bizarre.

In these plays reality is created anew each time by characters whose capacity for myth making is prodigious and whose anguish at recognizing the recycled essence of their illusions is profound.

And always he hears the sounds of mordant laughter, the fool's malicious jests couched in paradox, the cries of pain and astonishment at the confidence man's swift manipulations of certainties into illusions, and the sighs of the weak yearning for the seats of the powerful.

Ribman's first commercial publication was an article, co-authored with his father, in the April 1964 issue of Harper's Magazine, titled "The Poor Man in the Scales," a study of the problems faced by indigent defendants in the federal courts.

[2] Ribman's most famous early play, The Journey of the Fifth Horse based on Ivan Turgenev's short story "The Diary of a Superfluous Man," won an Obie Award and starred a young Dustin Hoffman in the role of Zoditch.

[4] In 1983, Ribman's play Cold Storage was chosen to be staged by Classic Theater International at the Hague, Netherlands to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the establishment of Dutch-American diplomatic relations.