Theatre The Rimers of Eldritch Hub Theatre Center, Boston Tonight and Saturday

GOING to the Hub is like seeing a play in your neighbor's living room. The theatre is in the basement of the Old West Church, in the Sunday School room. It is practically dark when you arrive; the only light comes from the Church kitchen, where they sell (what else?) coffee and doughnuts. The place exudes friendliness, Hub Theatre people are highly philosophical about what they are in the business for. They see themselves as spreaders of the gospel of "life," preachers of the essential goodness of man; that "man can and should be a determiner of life rather than a victim." Gut-level communication with their audiences is crucial. But in its production of The Rimers of Eldrich, the Hub Theatre creates an emotional distance that belies their theatre, the text, and the purpose of their company.

The Rimers of Eldritch, written by Lanford Wilson in the early '60's is a glimpse at the problems of a small and decaying coal mining town in the Midwest. It is in the style of Spoon River Anthology, with short, essentially unconnected dialogues and monologues. The play's leitmotif is a rape which has galvanized the town in classic whodunit style. When they don't talk about the rape, the characters lead what we presume to be their normal lives.

Wilson's play has neatly divided the town of Eldritch into the good guys and the bad, the well-socialized pillars of the community against the outcasts, cripples, and those with, as he puts it, "deformed minds." But all the good guys do is gossip and criticize; the woman who runs the cafe must be immoral because she has a handsome young assistant and now closes up nightly at ten. The bespectacled high school student must be strange because he doesn't spend his time tooling around the town square in his car; the crippled little girl spends too much time with him; she too must be strange. But it is the bad guys that get all the good lines, all the ones about the glory of humanity, the joy of being alive, the wonderful meaning of it all.

The language in Wilson's play is at times quite stunning. He has used the technique of identical repetition of a few scenes to good effect. But repetitiveness can be boring, as example by an old man's reminiscence of a night he spent in a woodshed with the local rich girl. He endlessly repeats the same fragments of his mind; her breasts, the dew on the grass, the smell of the wood chips, while he makes sassafras tea for his dog.

THE PRODUCTION is well acted; movement is highly disciplined, line readings are tightly paced. The dialogues between Bernie Duffy, as the high school student who doesn't like cars, and Clara Sztucinski, is his crippled companion, are consistently the best in the production. They create a sense of two people too alike to not understand each other, yet too unsure of themselves to do anything but play games.

The direction of Rosann M. Weeks is where the production falters. It has a clock-like regularity which only serves to emphasize the problems of a play that consists of truncated dialogues. Each scene transition has the actors shout and bustle, only to freeze in position as the lights come up for the next scene. During most scenes, one character mimes something "homey," like folding laundry or cooking pot roast, as the other sits nearby and philosophizes. The widening emotional gap that mars the production is caused by this deadening regularity of style. The vignette approach is good for portraying isolated events in the lives of almost any number of people; when those lives start to change, to create patterns that intermesh, fall apart, and re-form, the same mechanical method is increasingly ineffective. Any new elements of character are discontinuous with previous characterization. When the rapist is finally revealed, for example, the revelation makes no sense in terms of what we were previously told about his character. The play eventually becomes a series of scenes interesting in themselves, but meaningless when taken in sum.

Which is really too bad. The Hub Theatre wants to tell its audience something, and by telling, to learn. The Rimers of Eldritch and the style to which it is limited are simply not capable of producing this kind of realization.