The plot revolves around the sexual assault of a teenage girl and an unrelated murder trial in the town of Eldritch, exploring a community's reaction to rape, lies and murder.
"Mr. Wilson handles the collage technique so beautifully that we leave convinced no other method would have served half so well. This reviewer liked Rimers for its fluidity, for its language, for its almost musical sense of pattern."--The New York Times The mystery is, who he is, who murdered him and what were the circumstances? And to solve it, Wilson looks at the outsides and insides of his tiny, Middle Western town. He looks at a middle-aging woman who falls in love with the young man who comes to work in her café. He looks at a coarse, nasty woman mistreating her senile mother, who is obsessed with visions of Eldritch being evil and headed for blood-spilling. He looks at a tender relationship between a young man a dreamy, crippled girl. But Wilson sees far more than this. He is grasping the very fabric of Bible Belt America, with its catchword morality (“virgin,” “God-fearing”) and its capability for the vicious. He senses the rhythm of its life and the cruelty it can impose. He understands the speech patterns of its loveless gossips, its sex-hungry boys, its compassionless preachers, its car-conscious blondes. In the end his portrait of Eldritch is full length, and the truth of its revelations will be pondered long after the stage lights have dimmed and the play has ended.
THE STORY: When murder roars through a small Missouri town, Ruth Hoch begins her own quest to find truth and honesty amid small town jealousies, religion, greed and lies. This tornado of a play propels you through its events like a page-turning mys
THE STORY: The scene is the lobby of a rundown hotel so seedy that it has lost the e from its marquee. As the action unfolds, the residents, ranging from young to old, from the defiant to the resigned, meet and talk and interact with each other during t
THE STORY: Liz Barnard is an anthropologist studying West Coast gangs for behavior similar to African tribes. Her son, Don, is a homosexual Episcopal minister whose parishioners are poor and many sick with AIDS. Liz's daughter, Barbara, is a gifted
THE STORY: Two young suburban couples, friends of long standing, are suddenly aware of strains and pressures that have inexorably come into their lives. Adultery is one of these--a fact for one of the wives, an imminent possibility for one of the husbands--
Seven ethnodramas illustrate this emerging genre of arts-based research, a burgeoning but evident trend in the field of theatre production itself. With their focus on the personal, immediate and contextual, these plays about marginalized identities, abortion, street life and oppression manage a unique balance between theoretical research and everyday realism.