Word: eldritch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Rimers of Eldritch--New Ehrlich Theater, 539 Tremont St., Boston...
...CLEAR exactly what Lanford Wilson was trying to do with The Rimers of Eldritch. Rimers came out of the late 1960's a curious kind of half-breed. It broke from the traditional comedy or love-story categories into which most of Wilson's later work falls fairly neatly. It's not a murder mystery or a western, as the sensational excerpt on the publicity posters around campus might suggest. Instead, it's an early and uncertain try at experimental theater, one that ends up as a modern mood piece, a stained glass of many parts through which a light...
Director Lisa Kornetsky copes with some real structural problems in Rimers. The play is supposed to build through a succession of disconnected incidents, creating a montage of the life of the all-but-abandoned- town of Eldritch, and incidentally explaining a murder committed there. But the incidents stay disjointed, hanging in the air. Sometimes they offer an excuse for fiery confrontations; all too rarely do they work together to create any overall unity or dramatic power. The vignettes show the shoddy sides of the villagers and their gossipy morality, but that's been done before. Time and again, Rimers seems...
...Wilson is too sparing with the privilege. Only two characters, Skelly and Cora, both outcast by the hypocritical moralizers of the village, have the opportunity to assert themselves. Eldritch despises Skelly (Robert Gould) for some sexual misadventure decades past, but he is the one, peeping through windows, who really knows the sordid truths which underlie their lives. Gould infuses the twisted, misanthropic Skelly with some of the most convincing passion in the play. Cora (Jennifer Divine), likewise denounced by the villagers, also achieves a down-to-earth honesty with the audience, though without the monologues. And had the role...
...distance, precisely, from hurrah to blah. The time of the drop was nearly instantaneous. One moment Lake Placid was the most tumultuous news spot on earth, the next it was an amiable litter of vacancy signs. One moment it was the riveting center of the media's eldritch universe; the next it was just another out-of-the-way resort more or less waiting for next summer's convention of volunteer firemen...