Candles to the Sun

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 128 pages
• Published by: New Directions Publishing Corporation August 30, 2004
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0811215741
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0811215749
• Book Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Weighs: 4.8 ounces

Product Review
A little of the pace and flavor of O'Neill and some scene management reminiscent of Chekhov. -- Shenandoah, Winter 2004

Product Description
The first full-length play by novice playwright Thomas Lanier Williams to be produced, Candles to the Sun was premiered by The Mummers, a semi-professional and socially aware theatre troupe in St. Louis on March 18, 1937, and received rave reviews in the local press. Set in the Red Hills coal mining section of Alabama and dealing with both the attempts of the miners to unionize and the bleak lives of their families, the play, according to St. Louis Star-Times critic Reed Hynds, is "an earnest and searching examination of a particular social reality set out in human and dramatic terms."

Working principally from a script supplied by Jane Garrett Carter (who played Star in the original production), Dan Isaac, as he did in his edition of another "early" Williams' play, Spring Storm, uses his directorial and scholarly skills to prepare a version as close as possible to the 1937 production while providing contemporary readers (or actors) with the necessary social, political and theatrical context to make the play accessible and relevant once more.

Reader Reviews
Tennessee Williams wrote CANDLES TO THE SUN in 1937 at Washington University in St. Louis, for a "semi-amateur" theater group called the Mummers. Now, nearly seventy years later it is in print in a lovely edition from New Directions, his longtime publisher. This was his first play to receive a production; he hadn't even adopted the sobriquet "Tennessee" yet. It's a piece of social realism, relatively speaking, and the main characters are coal miners and the activists who seek to unionize them. Underneath it all you can see the outlines for the play of power and greed that became SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH several decades in the future. A bleak chorus of coal miners speaks in poignant Walker Evans terms about the terrible lives they are forced to live in the Depression. "My kids are swole up in the belly from not gettin' fed." Another agrees, "Yestiddy I caught my youngest puttin' dirt in her mouth." Third Miner: "Hell, mine eat grass for supper." Against the darkness a tremulous love story, between "Star" and "Red" struggles to see expression. STAR: "I didn't want to be tied down with Jake Walland or any of his kind. That's what I meant by wanting freedom. Now I don't want it any more. I want the kind of life that you could give me and if I can't have that kind of life, Red? I don't want any kind of life at all. Yeah. That's how gone I am!" You'll be "gone" too when you read CANDLES TO THE SUN. Just close your eyes and you're a mile underground with coal dust in your lashes. PS, When will we get a reading edition of THE MAGIC TOWER, the play he wrote just around the same time for the same group? I don't even know if THE MAGIC TOWER is a fantasy or a realistic play.