“Candles to the Sun”
Written by Tennessee Williams
Showing: Eclipse Theatre at Victory Gardens Greenhouse, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave., through May 4
Tickets: $25-30
Contact: (773) 871-3000; eclipsetheatre.com

By Lawrence Bommer

CFP theater editor

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.