By Ruben Willis 24102833

Introduction

The Rimers of Eldritch written by Lanford Wilson is set in the remote, fictional town of Eldritch in Missouri during the late 1950s and focuses on the small society of its inhabitants. On first reading the play, I was immensely confused due to its alien setting, unchronological story line, as well as it’s complex web of characters. After reading it through with the ensemble, alongside a few more times on my own, I began to grasp the story a little bit more. Despite this, I got straight into researching the playwright, the history of Missouri at the time, and a few of the themes I had never worked with before.

Research and Analysis of the Play

Due to the vast number of themes in the play, as well as plenty to research involving the history of Missouri, we worked as an ensemble dividing the research into smaller segments before coming together to discuss our findings, with myself taking a look into the literature and music that was released/popular at the time.

We also began piecing the play together by creating a map of Eldritch and a diagram of how each of the characters linked, including family and friendships, to make the connections more tangible. One of the most useful things we did early in our process however was going through the play slowly and sectioning each part off as Wilson didn’t add specific scene separation. This way we were able to not only tackle scenes as their own individual body but work out the timeline of the play in more detail.

By the end of this part in the process, I felt confident in understanding the skeleton of the play and the town of Eldritch we had created together. I also felt more confident in the knowledge of the environment in which Wilson would have written the play in and how each of the themes he had chosen were relevant to the story as well as his personal life.

Skelly

I was cast in the role of Skelly Mannor, an elderly man whom the majority of Eldritch fears and/or dislikes due to a rumour about something he did many years ago, resulting in him being ostracised by most of their society.

I was instantly drawn to the role as it was something I had never tackled before and wanted to challenge myself in this process. It is interesting to look back on my original thoughts on the character and see how much deeper I managed to dig throughout my time working with him. Though Wilson doesn’t mention certain choices I made by name, I was able to discover things such as a need for companionship through his loneliness, a slight drinking problem as a way to cope with his constantly debilitating mental health, and a strong passion through the character’s gratitude towards the small things he had in his life.

Despite this, I felt as though we are only meant to feel empathy towards Skelly a certain amount as I quickly discovered that all the people in Eldritch are bad to a certain degree, even those who are misunderstood. I worked hard to find purpose behind all of the bad choices Skelly makes as well. This included a desire to know everything that’s going on, hence his constant spying on the townspeople, as well as a passion to save all those he believes are in danger, giving meaning behind his standoffish persona and constant aggression when attempting to speak his mind.

The Process

Having looked at it in detail earlier in the year, I was finally presented with an opportunity to try out my personal process in detail. This was as well as adapting my ensemble process to the way our director worked and finding a balance between the two.

I would arrive at the space early each day in order to do a personal physical and vocal warm up. I also find it incredibly useful for myself to do something that warms up may brain as well so that I am mental ready for the day alongside my body being ready to work. We would also play “Keepy Up”, a game which involved us as an ensemble working together in order to keep a ball up in the air only hitting it one at a time. This helped us all connect as a group before beginning work on some often hard-hitting topics.

The first part of our process as an ensemble was going through the script section by section, as we had previously united, and working out what we knew was fact as well as writing down anything we needed to question. This helped me create more of an image for who I felt Skelly was, what he had been through, what he was currently going though, and what his actual connection with each other character was. This also helped me create a timeline of Skelly’s scenes so that I was able to work out what he had already experienced in each scene, giving me a clear understanding of what his objectives were in following moments. By the end of this, my notepad was full of questions about Skelly, meaning I could go home each day and answer them in as much detail as possible in order to ready myself for scene work and come with offers.

In terms of my personal process, we did my first step as an ensemble: deep dive into the script and do some detective work. I then moved onto working out my character’s intentions in each of the scenes, which was aided by all of the questions I have previously written down.

The next part for me was the most difficult: voice and physicality. When I mentioned Skelly being like no other character I had played before, these were my main thoughts in terms of challenging myself.

In my head, Skelly is around 75 years old, based on the clues Wilson left us, and spends the majority of his time walking around on his own, meaning he is elderly yet constantly on his feet. There are also multiple scenes in which we see him physically assaulted and therefore has most likely had many injuries which getting increasingly more costly with his age. I based my physicality on this, making him almost a canvas of his previous encounters: a hunched back from trying to keep his head down, knees that were worn out from walking around every day, and shaking hands that were a mixture of terrified and yet ready to defend at any second.

We worked on a southern American accent in classes early this year and it was one I felt confident in portraying. However, I wanted to add a gravelly tone to Skelly as he is often shouting and is much older than I am. Though finding this voice came to me relatively quickly, I worked hard on making sure it was sustainable and that I was able to do it in a way that wasn’t hurting me.

Our director gave us the offer of creating a fact file on our character (see in next section) to help further understand them, with one of her offers being to relate them to an animal. This led me to explore Skelly more physically and mentally as I incorporated some of the techniques I had been introduced to in animal studies. My focus became more on the breath of the character as well as what his movements and intentions are when he isn’t speaking or even noticed in a scene.

Throughout the 5 week process, I discovered that a character needs to be as human as possible for an audience to connect with them. For the first time in my career, I found myself trying to create a person that could be presented on stage through this story, instead of simply making a character who existed only when on stage.

Breakthrough Moments and Challenges

A huge breakthrough moment for me was working on Skelly’s monologue at the beginning of Act 2. It’s rare that we see a monologue from a character that almost completely contrasts how we view them from the rest of their scenes. This moment was so interesting for me to play with as Skelly is someone who spends the majority of his time alone, so I wanted to accentuate to the audience the hidden life of this character – a unique opportunity.

Similar to the rest of our group process, I went through and wrote down any questions with answers that weren’t given to us in the text. It was also so useful to get an insight from the rest of the ensemble through any questions they had, as well as getting the chance to hear any suggestions they had towards the character.

When working on the scene in calls with the director, we worked on making sure it was sectioned off into different moments. One thing I struggled with in particular was making sure each moment of storytelling was unique in order to drive home the message as well as keeping it engaging. To do this, I wrote down a number of different ways you could perform a monologue (redirects), before trying them all out. For the most part, they didn’t match the context of the scene, however I was able to find moments of inspiration and new meaning to lines which I had never noticed before.

Another part of the process I found challenging was working on the fight scenes and their choreography. This was the first time I have done stage combat involving more than one other person on stage with me (4 to be exact). I worked hard with our fight captain to get the choreography as accurate as possible, going over it multiple times, usually as slowly as possible.

The second issue I faced during these moments was maintaining the physicality of my character whilst being pushed around the space. As a young adult, I find it quite easy to steady my body and react when I’m thrown of balance for example. This made it largely difficult to get those reactions out of my head and try to embody Skelly in these situations, and rapidly aging man with countless other injuries. However, I was able to overcome this issue again by going through the movements slowly and mapping out exactly how I was going to take each step before attempting the scene at real speed.

Conclusion and Evaluation

On the whole, I am immensely proud of myself and the ensemble for what we were able to achieve in the span of 5 weeks. I have finally been able to put my personal process into use as well as having an opportunity to work with an external director and tailor certain parts of my process towards how they work.

I was also grateful to have the chance to do an audition in a format similar to how one would be done professionally in the industry. This led me to do more of my own research alongside making sure I come to the room with bold choices, background work on characters, but most importantly the willingness to be receptive to new ideas.

When first approaching this project, I was silently nervous and concerned about actually working on a play for the first time as an individual in this ensemble. Not due to the people, simply due to the fact that I wanted to create a piece of work that I was proud of as part of the group. Despite this, I found myself opening up more and getting as involved in possible throughout the process. I was making more offers, answering more questions, and pushing my ability as an artist to the highest potential. I used skills I have learnt over the previous year such as animal studies, Stanislavski techniques, and thorough research, all of which are now an integral part of my process. I feel as though I became a better actor during this work, and it reminded me of why I love the craft so much.