The Rimers of Eldritch Highlighted Photo

About the Play: Rimers of Eldritch reveals through its carefully fragmented visions a small town community in the process of spiritual and physical decay. Crumbling facades, flaking paint and rusting metal serve as powerful metaphors for an even more devastating and pervasive moral corruption engendered by false righteousness, widespread hypocrisy and formidable apathy.

This bleak worldview is gracefully softened however, by individuals who escape the deperate milieu of cruelty and harsh judgement with waking dreams and inspired fantasies.

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Voices chant in overlapping fragments, faces flicker ... pools of light isolate the complicity or ineffectuality of the town's citizenry.

Concept Summary Rimers possesses a unique and fluid rhythm bearing strong resemblance to the medium of film, and therefore demanded a cue orchestration that was both complex and attuned to the weaving movements and flowing pace. Texture washes serve as connective tissue between otherwise isolated acting areas.

To capture the decay in Eldritch, the palette consists predominantly of earth tones, cold blues, and muted color values. Emphasis was placed on the themes of decay, rust, and autumn. Surfaces and characters were treated with large amounts of texture to reinforce these central images. Scenes involving the dreamers are lit in high contrast by embodying warmer, more imaginative tones.

Rimers Light Plot
Rimers Light Plot
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About the Playwright / Background Information: One of America's best and most prolific playwrights, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lanford Wilson wrote The Rimers Of Eldritch early in his career. In the mid-1960s, America was in the midst of a radical transformation and the American theatre mirrored this climate of cultural change. With Rimers, Wilson explores false morality in a small, mid-western town that leads to murder and innocence lost. The play grasps at the very fabric of Bible-Belt America, with its catchword morality and capability for the vicious.


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