Twisted Lives

The 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 the trial of a woman who killed a presumed rapist.

The townspeople take turns moving into the spotlight to give an account, not so much of the murder, as of their own thwarted hopes and twisted lives. The 34-year-old deserted wife of a cafe 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.

In his third off-Broadway drama, Missouri-born Playwright Wilson has not avoided the cliche that small towns spawn only people who are quirky and vicious. Fortunately, the honesty of language, the evocative direction of Michael Kahn, and the uniform skill of the cast, make Wilson's vision plausible. In his play, the milieu is really the message. Something in the U.S. heartland's culture itself seems to stifle his characters' heartbeats whenever they try to make an openhanded gesture of the flesh, the mind or the spirit. Wilson's Rimers are indeed what their collective name implies: a people who blanket their lives with hoarfrost.

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