Rimers, But Few Reasons

IT'S NOT 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 flickers darkly. Yet Quincy House executes the play cleanly, pulling some intense and honest moments out of a puzzling and in many ways flawed play.

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 to be retreading ground already broken by Thorton Wilder's Our Town.

Kornetsky harvests what possibilties there are in the ambiguity of the work. There remains a lot of room for a director to interpret and experiment in a play so uncertainly structured. She does well in articulating the separateness of the scenes, which Wilson has ordered just arbitrarily enough to prove to skeptics that, yes, this is art. She is helped enormously by Wayne Kramer's set, which suspends translucent panes to suggest, in turn, a church, a court, a restaurant, or a porch; it simply but effectively divides up the stage to focus attention Kornetsky's tableaux. Reflecting off the background windows, the lighting works with the set to emphasize the moments of tension. But what really makes the staging work is Kornetsky's blocking, which moves Rimer's many characters between the floating planes to create trompe d'oeil illusions of depth.

UNFORTUNATELY, most of the characters themselves seem trapped in the second dimension by the strictures of Wilson's meager characterizations. Some do manage to get beyond these limits, but usually only to generate brief moments of excitement. Wilson steadfastly refuses to let any one of his seventeen characters become a focus of attention, begrudging any one enough material or time on stage to develop a full or interesting character. The only chance for a single character to take over the stage comes in the short quasi-monologues that Wilson sprinkles throughout. These speeches, in which the actors have been given the chance to create their own illusions, are the only moments to remember after the play has ended.

But 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 not been somewhat overplayed, the part of Mary Winrod (Miriam Schmir) as a senile old witch might have also stirred some passion.

Too little kindling is laid down for the fires that burst up. Wilson succeeds in giving his audience a jaundiced, disturbing look at the background of village life. But what might have made effective background serves as Rimer's meat and potatoes. In place of characters, the audience gets caricatures: the gossipy old women (Suzanne Vine and Ilana Hardesty) knitting the scenes together: the gushing, pouting hot-pink bobby-soxer (Alexandra Loeb); the broad Mid-western accents of a farmer (Paul Breenhalgh); the fire-and-brimstone preacher and judge (both by Paul Erickson). There are so many roles that the caricatures all blur together, making the audience work to unsort the characters and their relationships.

The one real attempt to construct a dynamic relationship between characters, the strange attraction between an embittered younger brother (Patrick Marren) and a crippled little girl (Gabrielle Savage), doesn't enliven the flatness. The girl is too shrill, the boy too lacklustre and unemotional.

For all these problems, the production still draws you in, makes you want to find out what the play is hiding. Unfortunately, there may be nothing there to find. Any message seems lost in the playwright's preoccupation with experimenting with then-new techniques.

A good play should grow into a gestalt; Rimers remains an assortment of pretty parts. The metaphors of disunion in Rimers' lighting and staging, as dramatically effective as they are, serve finally to reflect the essential fragmentation of Wilson's script. The actors play their parts with conviction, but you're never really sure just what it is that they're convinced of. The audience sees a good production, but never discovers why Rimers is there in the first place.