Candles to the Sun

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desertcart.com: Candles to the Sun: 9780811215749: Williams, Tennessee, Isaac, Dan, Isaac, Dan: Books Review: What a beginning - 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. Review: アラバマ州の炭坑を舞台にして、炭坑町の男女や家族、炭坑事故や労働争議を描いた作品。 こう書くと典型的な「社会派演劇」と思われがちだが、矛盾を含む人間像が深く彫りこまれており、全編を通して底層に流れる悲しみが読者の心にしみ込む。 二十歳代の学生の作品とは信じ難い名作。代表作と呼んでも差し支えないと思う。