Playwright: Tennessee Williams . At: Eclipse Theatre Company at Victory Gardens Greenhouse, 2257 N. Lincoln. Phone: 773-871-3000; $20-$25. Runs through: May 4
Is Tennessee Williams' 1937 drama Candles to the Sun a masterpiece? Not when compared to his later works like The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
But don't dismiss this early Williams play, because it shows off the extraordinary promise of the then-budding playwright.
Despite its imperfections of a sprawling cast with oversimplified characterizations, Candles to the Sun still packs an emotional punch that hints at Williams' later masterpieces. Praise be to Eclipse Theatre Company for being brave and skilled enough to produce the first professional production of Candles since its debut.
Candles burrows into the lives of the tragic Pilcher coal-mining family living in Arkansas during the Great Depression. Despite the best efforts of the family's women to find an escape from that insular mining town, their efforts tragically fail as the mine and its management pluck away their loved ones.
While there is some hope at the end, it comes at the expense of many lost and ruined family lives.
This is Williams in what you might call his 'red' period, and at times you feel like he's preaching at you from atop a soapbox to look at the bigger picture for the sake of labor and humanity ( this is where the title's metaphor comes in ) . But being penned in during the Great Depression, it shows how Candles was illuminating peoples' desperation of the time.
Director Steven Fedoruk adeptly handles the sprawling cast and text that would wear out its welcome in less-capable hands. Kevein Hagan's boxy lumber set is appropriately claustrophobic like a mine tunnel. An added bonus is the live fiddle playing of Stephen Dale and harmonica noodlings of Ross Travis to give the show an aural sense of the time.
Shining front and center among the actors is Rebecca Prescott's passionate performance as Star, the loose daughter who gets kicked out almost immediately, only to later take up with the town's handsome labor agitator Birmingham Red, ( an attractive and solid performance by Sorin Brouwers ) . In Star, you can see the progenitor of Williams' later emotionally lashing heroines.
Since the other characters aren't as fully developed or as showy as Star, they tend to blend into the background. Still, they build a strong picture of the ensemble, no matter how small their roles might be.
There's much to admire in Chuck Spencer's dazed take on the clumsy uneducated miner patriarch Bram, CeCe Klinger's blowsy take on the exhausted mother Hester and Julie Daley's low-key approach to down-and-out daughter-in-law Fern.
Candles isn't fully developed Williams, but there's enough there to admire and remind yourself of his later glories. See Candles now before it gets snuffed out.