Lanford Wilson's "Rimers of Eldritch" should be staged often in post-2016 America.

Some impressions after reading Rimers of Eldritch: Lanford Wilson’s 1966 play for voices is his answer to Our Town: it’s almost an inverse of Thorton Wilder’s earlier iconic American work, in terms of how it offers a dark vision of the corruption and deceit in small town American life. (This seems intentional, as there’s a character named Cora Groves, which sounds like the inverse of “Grover’s Corners.”) The characters could be described as the ancestors of today’s “Trumpers.” 

Rimers is set in a former coal mining town in the Midwest that has been abandoned by progress: it has decayed into an almost ghost town, replete with boarded-up movie theaters, rusting factory towers, broken-down-buses, and tumbleweeds. Industry has left now that the land has been raped, and the people who remain are lost and without hope. 

photo still from a 2011 production of The Rimers of Eldritch by Stoneham Theatre, aka Greater Boston Stage Co.

Composed of seemingly unrelated vignettes, the purposefully jumbled narrative jumps back and forth in time, but over the course of reading the play, characters, themes, and a concrete plot emerge that reflect the back-biting, condemnation, and betrayal that occurs in a town where everyone spies on everyone else. In Eldritch, the characters all think they know everybody else’s business, but of course they're all actually wrong about each other. Sexual desire is condemned in public, yet acted out savagely and with lustful abandon in private. People scoff at the poor while covering up the sins of the more well-off. The court of small-minded public opinion influences the actual judicial court, and the preacher who supposedly leads people to salvation does so by condemning the innocent and exploited while ignoring the truth. Religion enables hypocrisy: people point fingers at their neighbors who have found some relief from misery, some happiness, even though in reality the finger-pointers seethe with jealousy. Leaving an innocent man dead, tragically accidental gun violence is rationalized as necessary for the protection of the community, while a rape is covered up and the criminal is allowed to walk free. Willful ignorance, nostalgia for the past, refusal to adapt, and a sort of honest naivety blend in the minds of the townspeople to give them a sense of self-righteousness, even as they instinctively know they need to be saved from themselves. 

Sound familiar? This play should be done by every single theater in America in 2018.