What is the meaning of "candy striper" in the following paragraph?
Samuel Beckett gets all the credit for being the darkest playwright — fail, fail again, etc. — but compared to Edward Albee, Beckett’s a candy striper. In Three Tall Women, Albee demonstrates that when it comes to death and dying, he’s as unflinching as the ward’s oldest hand, and a good deal more expressive.
(from a review on independent.com)
I consulted a number of dictionaries and found out that "candy striper" actually means "a young volunteer worker at a hospital," but I don't think this meaning applies to the word in the above paragraph.
Best Answer
While @pbasdf comes close with their answer, that the terms is used
...It is missing the context that the secondary derived meaning of 'candy-striper' is:
This definition is taken from Wiktionary, but is backed up by quotations such as this from Reflections of a Baby Boomer by Janice Hiatt Steil:
and Coffee Time by L. Shadows:
So the writer is saying that, in comparison to Edward Albee, Beckett writes cheering exuberant works.