"New" Play by Tennessee Williams a Call to Arms for Prison Reform

U of Ideas of General Interest ñ September 1998

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Contact: Melissa Mitchell, Arts Editor (217) 333-5491; [email protected]

THEATER

ëNewí play by Tennessee Williams a call to arms for prison reform

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. ó Move over, Blanche DuBois Ö step aside, STEL-LAAAH!!! Ö hit the road, Brick. A whole new cast of Tennessee Williams characters is bringing drama to life on the worldís stages this year.

Thatís right, 60 years after it was written and 15 years after Williamsí death, a ìnewî play by one of the 20th centuryís greatest and most prolific American playwrights is being produced at long last. And the play, ìNot About Nightingales,î is giving the critics plenty to crow about.

ìThe critics are excited because theyíve discovered a new Tennessee Williams. Theyíre surprised that he wrote this call to arms,î said Allean Hale, an adjunct theater professor and Williams scholar at the University of Illinois. Hale edited the play and wrote an introduction to it for a newly published edition issued recently by New Directions.

A raw and gritty tale of prison torture, ìNightingalesî is based on a newspaper report Williams read about an incident at a Pennsylvania prison, in which four ringleaders of a hunger strike died after being locked in an airtight cell and subjected to ìthe steam heat treatment.î Williamsí dramatization of the prison tragedy was resurrected from the archives of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, largely through the efforts of British actress Vanessa Redgrave. ìNightingalesî received its world premiere last March in London, where it was co-produced by the Royal National Theatre and Redgraveís Moving Theatre company, which is associated with the Alley Theatre of Houston. It received its American debut in Houston in June, and begins touring in Germany, Italy and Norway in September.

In the New Directions introduction, Hale notes that ìNightingalesî is historically significant on a number of counts ñ not the least of which is that it portrays the young playwright as ìa political writer, passionate about social injustice.î It is also the first full-length play that Thomas Lanier Williams signed as ìTennessee,î Hale noted.

Why hasnít the play been produced until now? Hale offers various possible explanations:

ìNightingalesî originally was entered ñ along with four other one-act plays ñ in a competition sponsored by the Group Theatre in New York. Williamsí submission generated enough interest that the sponsors created a special award for him. That achievement landed him an agent, ìwho launched his Broadway career and changed his life,î said Hale, who speculated that ìNightingalesî may simply have been relegated to the back burners amid all the other events taking place in his life at the time.

She added that it wouldnít have been easy in the late 1930s for an agent to market a play featuring violent death, syphilis, a sympathetic black character and a drag queen. ìThe times had changed, and the day of the proletarian protest plays were over with the end of World War I and the Depression.î

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