The rarely produced, little-known Candles, Williams’s first full-length drama, sputtered to life in 1937 when the playwright, then just plain old Tom, was still in college and struggling to find his voice. Equal doses socialist agitprop and smoldering soaper, it casts the tragic collapse of the Pilcher family against the collective misfortunes of a mining-camp community fomenting a strike in the Red Hills of Alabama during the Great Depression. Think Waiting for Lefty in a Southern-gothic vein.

Eclipse makes the most of the budding playwright’s first brush strokes here, mining its own deft ensemble acting chops to stoke the rising tension. Spencer is spot-on as the deluded, steel-headed patriarch, a lifer whose unquestioning loyalty to the company persists even as it shrinks his wages and blackens his lungs. And Prescott and Brouwers burn up the rest of Candles’s wick as a castoff daughter and an idealistic union organizer, respectively, whose fight for the common good comes at the expense of personal gratification and love. Within Kevin Hagan’s claustrophobic wood-plank–cabin set, the couple makes the most of Williams’s first riffs on gender rifts, even as the body count—a statistic Tennessee eased up on later—rises.