Not About Nightingales

Never produced and unknown except to scholars, Not About Nightingales remained in library files until brought to the attention of Vanessa Redgrave who scheduled its World Premiere at the Royal National Theatre in London in March of 1998. The reviews were outstanding. Nicholas de Jongh of The Evening Standard wrote:"This is one of the most remarkable theatrical discoveries of the last quarter century. I came away astonished and appalled from the world premiere of this lost Tennessee Williams play, left untouched to moulder in the anterooms to oblivion for 60 years. . . . With a cinematic structure, an almost Jocobean sense of horror and suffering, and poetic flashes of later Williams, the play remains unlike anything else he wrote." Not About Nightingales is remarkable both as the work of an unknown twenty-seven-year-old and as a first play to carry the signature "Tennessee" Williams. The subject matter was literally right out of the headlines--a prison scandal which shocked the nation in the mid-thirties when convicts leading a hunger strike in a Pennsylvania prison were locked in a steam-heated cell and roasted to death. University of Iowa drama student, Tom Williams chose this news item to fulfill an assignment to write a "living newspaper" piece. "I have never written anything since that could compete with it in violence and horror," Williams said later about the full-length play he developed in 1938. Not About Nightingales shows us the young Williams as a political writer passionate about social injustice and reflects the plight of outcasts in Depression America; its flashes of lyricism and compelling dialogue presage the great plays Williams was later to write. But Not About Nightingales is also significant for its theatrical innovations. In a time of realism, Williams did away with curtains, used lighting to mark scene changes, and introduced an announcer and captions. In addition to showing the stylistic influences of European Expressionism and the 1930s agit-prop plays, Nightingales is one of Williams most cinematic plays with its rapidly merging scenes, suggested flashback, and notations of "fade-in" and "fade-out." Unproduced in its own time, perhaps because of its sympathetic treatment of black and homosexual characters, Nightingales is a unique offering among the group of "early plays" now scheduled for publication by New Directions (the others being Spring Storm, Candles to the Sun, and Stairs to the Roof). The play has been edited by eminent Williams scholar Allean Hale, who has also contributed an illuminating historical introduction.