Infinite Absence, Volume I

THIS IS VOLUME I OF A TWO-VOLUME SET. A novel by Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright Ronald Ribman.The year has gotten off to a bad start for Peabody, scion of Peabody Industries, the largest mining conglomerate in the world. Somebody at the annual board of directors meeting, which he chairs, has written down the word, "Asshole," on his yellow pad in response to Peabody's analysis of world affairs; Peabody's mistress, a Spanish lady of dubious background, bearing more than a faint resemblance to Dorothy Lamour and Hedy Lamarr, has been wooed away from her pimp by Peabody and unexpectedly fallen in love with him; while his brother, Hector, the one person in the world who has always loved and supported him, his "Man in South America," has been returned to him by unknown kidnappers, a ten-thousand dollar bill stuffed in his mouth and his severed head floating in the golden honey of a Peruvian Spirit Pot. Seeking to flee the impending Götterdämmerung he senses closing in on him, Peabody befriends a young Orson Welles and flees to California to try and close a business deal with Walt Disney, only to bite into a red candy apple handed him by an actress dressed as a witch at a party celebrating the premiere of Snow White, which sends him into a near-death coma requiring medical care.What is wrong with Peabody stretches back forty years and over five continents, from the Straits of Magellan at the tip of South America to the Bosporus pouring into the Black Sea on the shores of Asia, in a richly detailed poetic mosaic, a magisterial comic tale of love and lust, magical mystery and murder, where the protagonist's only hope for redemption comes from a God he calls, "Dreamfucker."

Ronald 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 Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for Cold Storage. After the American Repertory Theater's world premier of Ribman's Sweet Table at the Richelieu, Jonathan Marks noted a central theme in the playwright's work, that "What reveals itself repeatedly, throughout his work, is a preoccupation with the persistence of the past in the present--a recognition that we all carry with us a heavy baggage of seeds, each of which began sprouting at a different time in the past, and never stopped shooting out tendrils: a bag of memories which can never be simply dumped. "The figure that embodies this preoccupation, in play after play, is a character who seldom appears onstage: the lost one, the dear one who has disappeared, never to be recovered." Infinite Absence is Ribman's first novel.