Tennessee Sun

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.”