"The Rimers of Eldritch"

Theatre review
"The Rimers of Eldritch" at Syracuse Stage
Ithaca Times
December 3, 2008
718 words
"Midwestern Malaise"

full text here

Midwestern Malaise

Mark Tedeschi

The Rimers of Eldritch by Lanford Wilson. Directed by Geraldine Clark. Starring Alex Alcheh, Hilary Curwen, Megan Dobbertin, Sarah Gorman, Eric Grapatin, Peter Hourihan, Kerry Kazmierowicztrimm, Brad Koed, Becky Leifman, Patrick Murney, Kristian Rodriguez, Alanna Rogers, Amy Shapiro, Liz Tancredi, Lindsey Van Horn, Danielle von Gal, and Tara Windley. With dialect coach Joe Alberti, scenic designer Michael M. Nardulli, costume designer Lauren Levesque, lighting designer Christine E. Bernat, sound designer David Huber, and stage manager Kathryn Graves.

Now is about the time of year when, following a somnolent morning glance out the window, it's almost a comfort to see a delicate coating of rime completely covering the intricate, labyrinthine branches of a bare tree. Overnight winter stillness allows vapor to collect and freeze, transforming whatever it touches into a bleached apparition of what it used to be.

The handful of residents still inhabiting the 1953 Missouri ghost town of Eldritch in Lanford Wilson's The Rimers of Eldritch fit their title branding; they slowly cake their town with a chilly hoarfrost of gossip, but like the rime on a piece of vegetation, it's impermanent; sooner or later, it will build up and break off, baring its true nature.

In the dark and methodical Rimers, which completed its run at Syracuse Stage at the end of November, the cast inhabits the stage for the whole of its presentation. The fascinating, unconventional structure of the play offers its audience a fly-on-the-wall privilege: You can hear all that transpires, but the everyone-knows-everyone tidbits of hearsay don't entirely make sense at first.

The characters generally stay put, each in his or her designated area; Nardulli's minimal, pantomimed-props set conveys a deceptively straightforward assemblage of layered Eldritch settings - a porch, a preacher's pulpit doubling as a judge's bench, a boulder in the woods - all beneath a tilted cross hanging still overhead. Bernat's remarkable lighting design complements the speedy dialogue changes, smoothly illuminating whose turn it is to speak with an autumnal gold.

We gather - or rather, overhear - that there's been a murder of someone unnamed and a sexual attack directed at a young teen, Eva Jackson (Windley). Wilson's deliberate script delivers calculated smatters of information; dialogue overlaps, jumps to and fro in time, and is often revisited, so the specifics are signaled but not directly revealed until the climax. The townspeople offer each other their two cents on the shocking crimes and, since there is little else to do in Eldritch besides share slices of juicy misinformation, other goings-on in town.

Cora Graves (Tancredi) has taken in a much-younger Walter (Coed) as an employee and bedmate, as spouted in the beginning from the queens of buzz, Martha Truitt (Dobbertin) and Wilma Atkins (Gorman); Robert Conklin (Murney), pejoratively called "Driver Junior" after his late race-car enthusiast older brother, spends most of his time avoiding people save the physically disabled 14 year old, Eva; Josh Johnson (Alcheh), brother to Patsy (Curwen), and Lena Truitt (Leifman) begin seeing each other out of sheer proximity; everyone shares a loathing for the reclusive creeper, Skelly Manor (Rodriguez); and throughout, the town switches from attending the trial for the crimes at hand and worshipping at church (curiously, the Judge and Priest are both played by Kazmierowicztrimm).

Wilson's complicated storytelling technique cannot be executed well without quality actors, and Syracuse University's cast, under Clark's deft direction and Alberti's effective Midwest-dialect coaching, delivers. Windley's Eva convinces entirely as blossoming teen wrought with small-town cabin fever, especially in her scenes with Murney's Rob.

The most stunning performance comes from Rodriguez as Skelly; instead of the "deep, mangled, growling, almost drunken voice" in the original stage directions, he finds a higher-pitched sort of howl in the character's speech that teeters ambiguously on a tightrope between confidence and terror. Rodriguez delivers a riveting extended monologue, a centerpiece of the second act wherein his use of timing and gesture signals an outstanding and disciplined talent.

Skelly and Mary (played with appropriate chaos by Van Horn, supplemented by Shapiro's concerned Nelly), the two characters with the least of their minds left, seem to comprehend Eldritch better than the others. "People talk but they don't know - it's them that's the bastards," Skelly says simply. "I don't want to go up there," says Mary, afraid to be stuck in her room. "The evil town is all around me up there." But even Mary can't stop herself telling people that her daughter beats her.

The jabber amongst the township, when taken at face value, echoes the typical gossip one might find in a tabloid; but when scattered and reassembled, it reveals an obscured, melancholy poetry. Few in Eldritch are innocent of tossing these lyrical stories at one another, and as the town's layer of rime collapses under is own weight, its population is rendered both exposed and speechless.


Brad Koed and Liz Tancredi in the ‘The Rimers of Eldritch.’ (Photo by Michael Davis)