STAGE : Ronald Ribman Revels in ‘Chaos’ : ‘The most unpredictable of American playwrights’ is, after 25 years, also one of the most unknown

Ronald Ribman is settling into his seat just before the start of a crucial read-through of his new play, “The Rug Merchants of Chaos.” He flips through note-filled pages of his legal pad, while director David Schramm is ready to signal his actors James Morrison, Fran Drescher, Matt Landers, Barbara Whinnery and Ernest Harada to go through their paces. Ribman then reaches down into his satchel, pulls out a newspaper clipping, and hands it to his guest.

“Here, read this. It’s what this play is all about,” he says.

The headline reads: “Glass Door Slams on Deputies’ Rescue Attempt.” The report details the weird, random events surrounding the bloody April 4 hostage siege at a Sacramento Good Guys store. The story relates that because the store’s front glass door swung closed a moment sooner than a police sniper expected, the sniper’s bullet missed a targeted gunman, nicked the door and triggered a panic that led to three dead and seven wounded hostages. Things, to be sure, didn’t go as planned.

For Ribman’s two American couples, stranded on a garbage tow lurching out of Capetown, South Africa, their best-laid plans have gone up in smoke. (Literally: An arranged torching of their Oriental rug factory was botched, making it look like arson.) Now, Victor and Sheila Finkelberg (Landers and Drescher) and Max and Annie Mottram (Morrison and Whinnery) must adapt to their new circumstances.

For Ribman, as well, “The Rug Merchants,” opening tonight at the Pasadena Playhouse Balcony Theatre, represents new artistic circumstances. The South Salem, N.Y.-based playwright is seeing his work given a world premiere somewhere other than the East Coast for the first time in his 26-year career.

It marks a kind of reunion with Susan Dietz, the show’s producer who, as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote her thesis from 1972 to 1974 on Ribman’s plays.

The new comedy may also, he hopes, be the play that opens the door to a wider audience, after more than two decades of wide respect but elusive fame. Coincidentally, “The Sunset Gang,” his three-part adaptation of Warren Adler’s stories of Florida retirees, has just aired on PBS’ “American Playhouse.” (It is the latest of several Ribman TV scripts, including a startling adaptation of Saul Bellow’s “Seize the Day,” with Robin Williams.)

Notes Ribman’s agent and close friend Samuel Gelfman: “I find that theater people have known and loved Ron’s work for years, but audiences don’t know him. But it’s more loved than produced.”

This may also be a result of Ribman’s somewhat reclusive, untrendy nature. “Ron,” notes Dietz, “isn’t someone who’s part of ‘the scene.’ ” Even Ribman jokes that he’s so far out of the ‘90s that he doesn’t touch a word processor and keeps to his ‘40s-era Royal Standard typewriter.

High hopes are riding on “The Rug Merchants,” which has been optioned by producer Roger Stevens (of the Fund for New American Plays, which is financing more than one-third of the $100,000 Pasadena production) for possible East Coast shows.

But as a student of life’s randomness, Ribman, 58, knows that there are no sure things. “Success or obscurity in theater isn’t based on rationality,” he observes. As far back as 1966, critic Robert Brustein was remarking of Ribman’s second play, “The Journey of the Fifth Horse,” that its author was “a man with substantial literary gifts and a fine instinct for the stage, and I am astonished that this has not been more noted and acclaimed.”

Brustein, artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., has helped Ribman’s cause, producing “A Break in the Skin” in 1972, and a 1987 trilogy of “Sweet Table at the Richelieu,” “The Cannibal Masque” and “A Serpent’s Egg.”

Many plays, no hits. The closest was a healthy, six-month New York run for his 1976 comic drama, “Cold Storage.”

Brustein, speaking from his Boston home: “In another, more enlightened age, he would have been applauded and praised, and his neglect is exactly symbolic of how artists in this country aren’t appreciated.” But Brustein also suggests why Ribman may be the Great Unknown American Playwright, remarking that “(Ribman’s) a wild card. Without question, he’s the most unpredictable of American playwrights. I never know what he’s going to write next.”

Neither, it turns out, does Ribman. Even he seems a little amazed at the contrasts between his most recent plays: There’s the hellish world of cable TV in “Buck” (given an acclaimed 1989 staging at Hollywood’s Heliotrope Theatre), or the haunted world of the rich at a winter spa in “Sweet Table,” or “Rug Merchants’ ” cacophonous high seas adventures, or his just-finished three-act epic “The Dream of the Red Spider,” set in a South American totalitarian state.

“I use any technique that works,” Ribman explains, relaxing between rehearsal sessions in the living room of a Van Nuys home he is renting with his wife, Alice. “That is why all my plays are different. Each thought demands its own means of expression.”

One technique he confesses to be obsessed with is metaphor--a legacy of his pre-theater days as a struggling poet. Metaphor has such a hold on him that it fills his speech, as when he explains the variety of his plays.

“It’s as if you grow a rose one day, and it’s a gorgeous one. That doesn’t mean you’re going to just grow roses. That’s ugly. One day, I’ll feel like planting an iris, then a tree. Each is going to look different.” His voice, in high-pitched, pure Brooklyn tone, rises a little. “What drives me nuts is a producer or a critic who’ll say, ‘Gee, we loved your roses, why don’t you keep doing them?’ ”

Roses or palm trees, this word gardener’s results are driven by consistent concerns. “Each of my plays, especially the most recent ones, are distinct investigations into the meaning of the universe, what our role in it may be.”

They are not Big Ideas for their own sake, though, but the stuff of Ribman’s creative life. For the circuitous process behind the making of “The Rug Merchants” uncommonly echoes the seaborne dilemma of the Finkelbergs and the Mottrams. It is as if Ribman injects the same random course by which he arrives at his final play into the play itself.

For instance, just as rug entrepreneurs Max and Victor intend a “clean” torching of their business, only to have a disaster on their hands, Ribman originally intended his play as a tragedy, titled “Approaching Tasmania.”

“Then, as now, Shiela is the central character,” he explains, “but she was very manipulative, driving the rest of them to a horrible fate. It may have worked dramatically, but I didn’t know what I was trying to say.”

That was 1985. With “Tasmania” approaching nowhere, he put it aside to work on “Sweet Table,” which he had struggled with since 1972. That play fell into place, and after its Andrei Serban-directed production at Cambridge’s Rep, Ribman returned to “Tasmania.”

“Suddenly, it dawned on me,” Ribman recalls, “that the point wasn’t Sheila manipulating events, but that she be swept along by them. With her change of character as my guide, I moved the play from tragedy toward comedy.

“She’s on the outside looking in, aware that her companions are pulling her in a direction that she doesn’t want to go. They’re not imbeciles, but as they start and lose businesses, they go from continent to continent--Montevideo, Central America--until they’re at the tip of Africa. They’ve run out of continents. Now, they’re out in the middle of the ocean, and Shiela has this wave of fear that they’re drifting toward Antarctica.”

Thus, the new title for the new comic incarnation: “Fall Off the Earth.” After a reading at New York’s Playwrights Horizon, Ribman took it to the Off Broadway Circle-in-the-Square. A reading there led artistic director Theodore Mann to deem it, according to Ribman, “ready to go. But after a second reading, I saw that it did need changes, only not the same ones as Playwrights Horizon thought.”

Then, more surprise twists beyond the playwright’s control. According to Ribman, an expected Circle-in-the Square opening was suddenly canceled. Ribman decided not to keep the play at Mann’s theater any longer than the six months it had already been there.

The Los Angeles-based Gelfman, who recalls being “stunned” when he first read then-unknown Ribman’s TV and stage manuscripts in 1964, joined the battle. He shopped around what was now titled “Rug Merchants of Chaos” to various theaters, including the Pasadena Playhouse. Gelfman didn’t know of Dietz’s history with Ribman, and neither producer nor author had been in touch with each other since the mid-’70s.

“I couldn’t believe that I had my hands on a fresh Ron Ribman script,” recalls Dietz. “Only now, instead of looking at his play as a critic and scholar, I had to look at it as a producer.”

Dietz, growing disenchanted with what she terms the Pasadena Playhouse’s “hit-driven” policy, wanted out as artistic director. But the Fund for New American Plays grant stipulated that “Rug Merchants” be produced at Pasadena. After her November departure last year, Dietz managed to save the funding by fashioning a subscription season in the playhouse’s small Balcony Theatre, with “Rug Merchants” as the final show. “Without that move,” says Ribman, “I would have lost yet another production for the play.”

Ribman had what he terms “a pre-production script that I was happy with,” a producing theater, an option for future stagings, and an unconventional choice for director in David Schramm, who has a double career as both director and a renowned comic actor.

Still, actors with seemingly more lucrative offers slipped away, and then, among those most likely, Ribman says he and Schramm “didn’t always see eye to eye. But he often proved to be right. James Morrison, for example, wasn’t initially my idea of Max. But in the first reading, I heard a very fine actor at work. I had been wrong about him.”

Max, Ribman reveals, derives from his father, “an eternal optimist, a man in love with business.”

Ribman, like his father, veered from field to field. Entering Brooklyn College as a chemistry major, he switched to business administration, only to realize that he had no taste for business. He joined the Army in 1954, “and I just fell into writing. It was a brutal life, but you learn from crummy experiences, not the pleasant ones.”

After a stint with his dad’s coal business, he earned a doctorate in English at the University of Pittsburgh, then taught at Ohio’s Otterbein College, only to find “many teachers of the humanities, and very few human beings. I was 32, and still lost.

“But I took a leap of faith--as Sheila, Vic, Annie and Max do at the play’s climax--to find out if I could be a writer full-time. I didn’t want to be someone who would (later) wonder what might have been if he had taken the risk.

“And that’s what Sheila learns: There’s no life without risk, that we must get into the swim of things, even if it means our death.”

If anyone should know, it’s a playwright on the eve of an opening. “Right now, we feel we’ve finally found the play, the pace, the comedy. But you only know it’s working when the audience is with it, rapt. Until then, you’re not sure the damned thing is gonna work.”

Ribman then inserts a note of healthy pessimism: “Even then, the critics might not like it. There are more rockets sent into space than there are successful plays. So what does that tell you?”