Williams' poetry makes 'Candles' blaze
By Pam DiFiglio, Daily Herald (link)
Imagine your luck if you "discovered" a lost Shakespeare play or found an ignored early novel by J.K. Rowling.
Eclipse Theatre Co. has done something nearly as remarkable. They've found an early, little-known work by Tennessee Williams and mounted it, for only the second time since its original 1937 stage run. The power of the work, combined with Eclipse's strong acting and top-notch production, make this an extremely rewarding evening of theater.
"Candles to the Sun" explores the complex interactions of an extended family, much like Williams' later "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."
But unlike those later works, which pit family members against each other, "Candles'" characters mostly struggle against the injustice they face trying to eke out a living as coal miners in Alabama.
"Candles" is almost operatic in the scope of its emotions. If it were an opera, it would start with the theme of family matriarch Hester, and later her daughter-in-law Fern, wanting a better life for their sons than the danger of the coal mines.
Then family patriarch Bram, echoed by his son and grandson, would insist he must put bread on the table by slaving in the mines.
The drums of the mine owners would rumble, threatening loss of work, loss of life and starvation.
Bram and Hester's wayward daughter Star would be the soprano, wanting to settle down with Birmingham Red, the fiery tenor. He, alas, puts her off for a nobler cause. He's organizing a strike to improve the coal miners' lot.
Director Steven Fedoruk lets Williams' drama unfold with perfect pacing and allows the poetry of Williams' language to come out. He also infuses the play with folk music, including fiddle playing, that recreates the sound of Alabama's Red Hills country.
The cast delivers uniformly strong performances. In the buildup to the dramatic apex, the stage crackles with excitement as Rebecca Prescott, as Star, and Sorin Brouwers, as Birmingham Red, argue love and politics.
Many touches indicate the company thought through the details. For example, I immediately noticed the striking wooden set, a portrayal of Bram and Hester's cabin. It wasn't until the play's end I noticed it was built to also look like a coal mine shaft, enveloping all the family's interactions in the industry that shaped its destiny.
Critics Choice
Albert Williams - Chicago Reader (link)
CANDLES TO THE SUN This sprawling drama, about an impoverished family of Alabama coal miners swept up in a
Depression-era strike, is a sturdy if sometimes melodramatic period piece with considerable historical interest:
it was Tennessee Williams's first full-length play, written when he was in his mid-20s and virtually forgotten
after its 1937 Saint Louis premiere. Williams's gifts for poetic dialogue and strong characterizations are
evident, and the Eclipse Theatre Company's atmospheric production makes the most of them. Director Steven
Fedoruk's 15-person ensemble is superb; Rebecca Prescott is especially strong as the clan's rebellious,
slightly hysterical daughter, Star--a forerunner of such fierce/fragile Williams women as Blanche Du Bois,
Stella Kowalski, and Maggie the Cat.
Lawrence Bommer - Chicago Free Press
(link)
First - and last-produced more than 70 years ago by an amateur St. Louis company called The Mummers, Tennessee Williams' first full-length play is a revelation and a prophecy. With none of the intimacy or concentration of "Glass Menagerie" or "Streetcar," it's episodic and unfocused, uncharacteristic in its social activism and proletarian sympathy. (Clearly the young Williams was influenced by Clifford Odets and the Group Theatre.) Where later plays stick to the same time frame, "Candles" sprawls over 10 years. Only the characters predict the plays to come.
Revived in a stirring staging by Steve Fedoruk, "Candles to the Sun" focuses on the Pilcher family-Alabama mineworkers, their anguished women and their tested friends. From the start Williams captures the details of Depression-era poverty, scrimping and scrounging, earning a measly 12 cents for every ton of coal extracted and owing everything to a company store which only takes inflated "scrip" for payment. The patriarch Bram Pilcher (Chuck Spencer, growling with troglodytic ignorance) fights with his hardened mate Hester (CeCe Klinger, reinventing Ma Joad) who wants to save her sons from the mine. (Not surprisingly, she can't.)
Stubbornly and reflexively, the men deny any dreams that don't include black lung disease, mine cave-ins and indentured servitude. The women suffer even more. The Pilcher daughter Star (a powerful Rebecca Prescott) runs off, then returns to give herself to Red Birmingham (Sorin Brouwers in full dynamo drive), a labor crusader who organizes a strike. Fern Pilcher (Julie Daley, bringing much-needed tenderness to this hard tale) is the widow of a Pilcher boy who escaped Alabama only to die in a Pennsylvania anthracite mine. Fern has saved everything to send her son Luke (forthright JP Pierson) to school. But the present crisis-the strike-makes demands that force the future to be sacrificed.
Structurally unwieldy and unashamedly melodramatic, "Candles" is only as strong as each scene. But there you glimpse the once and future Williams. Star in particular-needy, petulant and salacious-anticipates Blanche DuBois and Maggie the cat. Bram, selfish and imperious, predicts Big Daddy. The sensitive, book-reading son Luke paves the way for Tom Wingfield to come seven years later. The supporting characters-religious busybodies, drunken do-nothings, hapless wishful-thinkers-are so many ghosts of the future.
Adding mellow texture to a stark story, musical director Victoria Deiorio delivers a warm sound-text of Baptist hymns and country ballads (played by handsome fiddle player Stephen Dale). Kevin Hagan's looming plank set suggests both the Pilcher's confining cabin and the claustrophic mines. The immense effort behind Eclipse's dramatic restoration pays off in the performances, if not the play. Though "Candles" is the quarry from which Williams would carve much stronger sculptures, it's thrilling to be present at the creation.
Tennessee Sun
Eclipse Theatre Company presents the Chicago premiere of an early Tennessee Williams play, Candles to the Sun.
By Dan Bacalzo - TheatreMania (link)
Tennessee Williams' Candles to the Sun isn't very well known, despite the fame of its author. "It was the first full-length play that he wrote under Thomas Lanier Williams," says Steven Fedoruk, who is directing the work's Chicago premiere for Eclipse Theatre Company. "It's this little gem that was produced in St. Louis in 1937 by a community/amateur organization called The Mummers. It was lost for nearly 50 years, and resurfaced in the 1980s through a woman that played one of the roles in that production."
Candles is set during the Great Depression, and spans a decade in the lives of three generations of miners in the Red Hills of Alabama as they attempt to unionize. "It's a play with ten scenes, each one almost a play by itself," says Fedoruk. "Collectively, they tell this amazing story with a lot of humor. But the key factor for me is Williams' wonderful poetry that weaves throughout and is one of the heightened elements of the piece."
Fedoruk is confident that the play holds up on its own merits, and that audience members who are only familiar with the playwright's more well-known works like The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire will enjoy the production. "There's this incredible metaphor of light and dark, good and evil, with the miners being called rats under ground in the darkness and the cabins being lit by a single lamp," he states. "Even back then, Williams was giving directors, actors, and designers these incredible tools to paint epic tapestries of beautiful stories."