The Rimers of Eldritch takes its place among several Wilson plays in which he explores the often violent consequences that attend a relationship to one’s own or to a collective past. All too often, the victims are socially marginal individuals: the physically or mentally handicapped, homosexuals, drug dealers, prostitutes, and various hustlers. Such a theme is evident in Wilson’s first major success, The Madness of Lady Bright (pr. 1964, pb. 1967), a one-act play in which an aging drag queen tries to come to terms with the ravages of time on his body and his friendships (his calls to old friends are met with disconnected numbers). Only “Dial-A-Prayer” offers a human, though taped, contact which can momentarily stave off the collected detritus of the past. In The Gingham Dog (pr. 1968, pb. 1969), a middle-class interracial couple, locked into their separate historical racial identities, divorce because they cannot accommodate the changes in each other that the Civil Rights movement has prompted.

Two other notable plays offer group protagonists, but in these later plays the group is a society of misfits rather than a society against them. Balm in Gilead (pr., pb. 1965) depicts a motley crew of urban misfits, two of whom fall in love. The hope of this union is cut short, however, when Joe is stabbed to death for trying to leave drug dealing; Darlene’s only recourse then is prostitution on the streets. The Hot l Baltimore (pr., pb. 1973), perhaps Wilson’s best-known play, gathers the inhabitants of a Baltimore hotel together on the eve of its demolition. As with The Rimers of Eldritch and Balm in Gilead, its story is told through the interwoven biographies—the pasts and the dreams—of the inhabitants. Burn This (pr. 1987), a contemporary love story about the ambivalence of commitment, is perhaps closest to The Rimers of Eldritch in its seamless interweaving of technique and story. As Wilson has said himself of this play, “it’s convoluted in exactly the same way those early plays are. But this isn’t circles, it’s mirrors and landscapes.”

With Burn This Wilson demonstrated that his early plays were not merely exercises in dramatic technique, as some feared, but preparations for the perfecting of his elliptical and oblique delving into social relations and the pulls of the past. His work with the trilogy of Talley plays—5th of July (pr., pb. 1978), Talley’s Folly (pr., pb. 1979), and Talley and Son (pr. 1981)—has brought him recognition on Broadway in addition to a Pulitzer Prize. While some may bemoan the trilogy’s “well-made” structure, which has undercut Wilson’s lyricism, others praise the intensification of action and concentration of character conflict. Whatever the merit of each criticism, as David Savran has noted, “Wilson remains a skilled writer of romantic fictions, providing audiences with a modicum of self-examination and thereby facilitating their return to a world less poised and graceful than his own.”