Word: eldritch
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Rimers of Eldritch, written by Lanford Wilson in the early '60's is a glimpse at the problems of a small and decaying coal mining town in the Midwest. It is in the style of Spoon River Anthology, with short, essentially unconnected dialogues and monologues. The play's leitmotif is a rape which has galvanized the town in classic whodunit style. When they don't talk about the rape, the characters lead what we presume to be their normal lives...
Wilson's play has neatly divided the town of Eldritch into the good guys and the bad, the well-socialized pillars of the community against the outcasts, cripples, and those with, as he puts it, "deformed minds." But all the good guys do is gossip and criticize; the woman who runs the cafe must be immoral because she has a handsome young assistant and now closes up nightly at ten. The bespectacled high school student must be strange because he doesn't spend his time tooling around the town square in his car; the crippled little girl spends too much...
...RIMERS OF ELDRITCH is both evocative and entertaining, as Lanford Wilson re-creates the mood and the milieu of a ghost mining town in the Midwest. Fluidly paced by Director Michael Kahn, Rimers is a collection of vignettes that might have come from Winesburg, Ohio, set in the dramatic form of Under Milk Wood...
...Rimers of Eldritch, by Lanford Wilson, is a little bit like seeing and hearing vignettes from Winesburg, Ohio set to the cadences and dramatic form of Under Milk Wood. Eldritch is a once coal-rich Midwestern ghost town, whose remaining citizens have become tiny little slag heaps of humanity. The frustrated urge to flee has become the venomous urge to flail one another. They use one of the weapons of the weak-their tongues-and the air they breathe is incessant and malicious gossip. It takes a crime for anyone to become visible in Eldritch, and the play revolves around...
...their own thwarted hopes and twisted lives. The 34-year-old deserted wife of a café owner has been sleeping with her handy man, a boy young enough to be her son. Another woman, admired for supporting her ancient, mentally enfeebled mother, actually beats the old lady. Eldritch also has its girlish flibbertigibbets (Susan Tyrrell and Katherine Bruce), its freak, a hunchbacked girl, and its leper, a whiskery derelict whom the local toughs mock with cries of "baaa!, baaa!" because he supposedly was once seen in an act of bestiality...