Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays, and: Candles to the Sun (review)

One of the most interesting aspects of the recent surge in Tennessee Williams studies and performance has been the discovery of previously unpublished and, in some cases, unproduced plays from the early years of his career, before the debacle of Battle of Angels and The Glass Menagerie's success. The most spectacular of these recovered texts has been Not about Nightingales, a play concerning a prison scandal in 1938 that was edited by Allean Hale for New Directions in 1998 and immediately snapped up for very successful productions in London's West End and Broadway.

Nightingales was one of five full-length plays known to have been performed during Williams' apprentice years, three more of which – Spring Storm, Stairs to the Roof, and Fugitive Kind (not to be confused with the film version of Battle of Angels) – have subsequently been published by New Directions and have received university productions. Candles to the Sun, which is the earliest of the five and almost certainly Williams' first full-length play, is now also available, edited by Dan Isaac, with a very interesting foreword by William Jay Smith, one of Williams' close friends from that period, who later became Poet Laureate of the United States. The play was begun at Memphis in the summer of 1935 as Williams recovered from a nervous breakdown caused by his work at the International Shoe Company and was first performed in the auditorium of the Wednesday Club of St. Louis in March 1937, by a semi-professional company called the Mummers. The director of that group, Willard Holland, also played one of the leading roles – the charismatic union organizer Birmingham Red – and helped Williams shape the staged version of the play from a huge pile of typewritten pages of draft.

A major difficultly in recovering all of these early works is Williams' maniacal method of composition. He was a speed typist who rarely planned what he was going to say but just jumped in and typed. As Dan Isaac explains in his textual notes for the edition, there are well over four-hundred pages of Candles to the Sun at the Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, representing drafts of at least four versions of the play, with The Lamp, Place in the Sun, and Candles in the Sun as alternative titles. Fortunately for Isaac, he was contacted as early as 1989 by Jane Garnett Carter, the actress who had created the role of the rebellious daughter Star, Williams' first female lead, who offered him a copy of the script as it was actually performed; and it is this script that has now been put into print, with a useful introduction and notes by Isaac, in addition to the foreword by Smith.

Williams always had difficulty with plot construction, typically assembling his plays from discrete sections like a mosaic, so it is interesting to discover that he was enabled to make the leap from one-acts to a full-length play because Candles had originally been plotted by another playwright, Joseph Phelan Hollifield, who was a friend of Williams' grandfather. A title page for the version called The Lamp has both authors' names on it, plus a pencil note of explanation by Williams: "Hollifield finished the original one-act play from which the title and partly the idea of the play was derived. I am doing the writing on the present manuscript and he is contributing some material from Alabama." The exact extent of Hollifield's contribution to the full-length text performed in 1937 is unclear, but Isaac suggests that Williams wrote or rewrote most of the dialogue and I would speculate that what he probably developed most was the dynamics of a dysfunctional family, as distinct from the...