About the Play:

Not About Nightingales is a full-length drama by Tennessee Williams. Portrays a shocking prison scandal in which a prison warden locked some convicts leading a hunger strike in a section of jail made unbearably hot by radiators. An early Tennessee Williams play is based on a true incident and indelibly presages the great plays he was later to write.

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. Based on real life events, the subject matter is a prison scandal which shocked the US in the mid-thirties when convicts leading a hunger strike in prison were locked in a steam-heated cell and roasted to death. "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. It shows us the young Williams as a political writer in Depression America; the play has humour, tenderness, and a passionate social conscience that never lets you look away.

Not About Nightingales remained unpublished for nearly sixty years when actress Vanessa Redgrave read William's own reference to it in a foreword to another of his plays. Intrigued by his description, she asked the Williams estate to find a copy of the manuscript, and subsequently produced the play, which premiered in 1998 by her own theatre company, Moving Theatre, and the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain. The play moved to the Alley Theatre in Houston, and the next year opened at the Circle in the Square Theatre on Broadway and was nominated for a Tony award for Best Play.

Cast: 3 women, 9 men

What people say:

"Enthralling...A feverish, full strength compassion for people in cages makes Nightingales fly toward a realm of pain and beauty that is the province of greatness...The emotions, both savage and painfully delicate, that saturate this work are arguably more rich and varied in tone than those of any American dramatist...The voices of Williams's entrapped nightingales...refuse to fade when the play is plunged into its concluding darkness." — The New York Times

"The best American play so far this season...It adds to the reputation of one of America's greatest playwrights." — The New York Daily News

"Fascinating." — The New York Post

About the Playwright:

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), one of the 20th century's most superb writers, was also one of its most successful and prolific. He was born in Columbus, Mississippi, where his grandfather was the Episcopal clergyman. When his father, a travelling salesman, moved with his family to St. Louis some years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evening writing. He entered the University of Iowa in 1938 and completed his course, at the same time holding a large number of part-time jobs of great diversity. He was awarded four Drama Critic Circle Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.