Analysis Of Lanford Wilson's The Rimers Of Eldritch

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Lanford Wilson’s The Rimers of Eldritch is a unique play which uses a lack of continuity between space and time to reveal a confusing and twisted story about a dark Midwestern town and its intriguing residents. From the very beginning, the play is set around the trial of a mysterious guilty party, and surrounded and interrupted by subplots that reveal the characters of Eldritch. The scene the story keeps returning to, amongst others, is the trial in the courtroom. At first it appears that Nelly Windrow is the one on trial, and because it takes awhile for the truth to be revealed, the play has to clarify that Nelly is not the one on trial but rather a man who can’t even show up to court because he was killed. This scene acts as somewhat of …show more content…

While this sometimes had a unique effect of making the audience realise what exactly they had been seeing before, often it made the play feel like a broken record. The repetition of scenes feels like watching the nightmare of a guilty criminal who is obsessing over how everything went wrong, but in a drug-induced sort of way. It also makes the scene of Eva and Robert walking in the woods less powerful. Just when the tension begins to build up the first time we see it, the scene abruptly shifts away. This happens again the second time we see it, so by the third time their conversation about flying and frost feels tiresome. However, the decision to gather all of the men on one side and all the women on the other during Robert’s harassment of Eva did achieve a profound emotional effect. Having the townspeople act as trees also helped give the feeling that everyone in Eldritch was implicit in the act, and allowed it to happen without interfering before things got worse, as the preacher points out in his sermons: “We took no action. The burden must be ours. We are all responsible for the shock of these two innocents” (10). Perhaps the most effective use of repetition in the play is when we again hear Robert’s testimony, but now knowing the truth we see him for who he really is, and not the helpless victim we assumed him to be

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