Tampa Repertory Theatre Presents Cold Storage; Streetcar Postponed Until June

Tampa Repertory Theatre will present Ronald Ribman's Dramatist Guild Award-winning play, Cold Storage, featuring the Rep's artistic director C. David Frankel and noted Tampa actor Jim Wicker. By turns darkly cynical and absurdly comic, Cold Storage engages with health care and end-of-life issues that don't seem to have changed all that much since 1978, making it both an entertaining and relevant play, suited to the mission of The Tampa Repertory Theatre.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Robert Koehler called the play "an intimate masterpiece."  In this essentially two-character play set at Hope Memorial Hospital, Ribman brings together Richard Landau (Wicker), in for exploratory surgery, and Joseph Parmigian (Frankel), a terminally-ill cancer patient (Miss Madurga, a private-duty nurse, played by Rose Riquel, is the third character).  Landau seems closed off from the world and determined to remain that way, while Parmigian resents his abandonment to the shrinking world of a hospital and fights to make the most out of his dwindling life.  Ribman, "a writer who's always worth listening to," according to Frank Rich in the New York Times, crafts this encounter between strangers into what Alvin Klein, also writing in the Times, calls a ". . . a life-enhancing play . . . revelatory and humorous."   

Cold Storage opens in Ybor City on January 19, at Hillsborough Community College's Studio Theatre in the Performing Arts Building, E. Palm Ave, between N. 15th and N. 14th Streets. Performances will be Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8PM, and Sundays at 3PM, through January 29. Regular admission is $20; students/seniors are $15.  

Cold Storage replaces the previously announced production of A Streetcar Named Desire which, because of some unexpected schedule conflicts, has been moved to June.

For more information about Tampa Rep, Cold Storage, and Streetcar, visit http://www.tamparep.org.

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