Customer Reviews

Not About Nightingales

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This is a brutal, but interesting and rewarding addition to the work of Tennessee Williams. A terrifying early play about social injustice, it is stylistically different from the poetic works that made Williams America's greatest playwright.

"Nightingales" is a harsh and realistic 1930s drama about inhumane prison conditions. The poetry and vivid characterizations that fuel the masterpieces is absent here, but the humanity remains.

References to Depression America have been left intact, which place the play in a specific time and date it somewhat. One wonders what changes Williams would have made had he returned to this "lost play" later in life. "Nightingales" is most definitely worth reading, after one is saturated with the masterworks.

Torn among O'Neill's rarely seen "The Iceman Cometh" and Miller's haunting "Death of a Salesman", I chose "Not About Nightingales" as the outstanding production on a recent trip to NYC. I was fortunate and honored to have seen this work with Corin Redgrave playing one of the major roles. This is, without a doubt, the best play of the 1998-1999 season on Broadway. It is a wonderful blend of William's poetry and some of the harshest, physical action I have seen on a stage. The entire cast was a joy to watch! Since theater is also literature, I'm positive you will enjoy reading this beautifully rough work by one of America's finest playwrights.

Not About Nightingales was written when Tennessee Williams was just 27 years old. It is based on a horrific prison atrocity in the 1930s that occurred in Pensylvania. The play, written in 1938, had been hidden in the archives until Vanessa Redgrave, who was starring in Orpheus Descending read about the play and tracked it down the script. It was first ever performed on the London stage in 1998.

The play is based on a horrific episode in our history in the 1930s, when a number of prisoners in Pennsylvania protested the lack of quality of food and the monotony of the food served. Twenty-five prisoners were taken to the "Klondike" cell where the steam of the radiator reached a heat that basically roasted four men alive. This form of torture was the reaction by the authorities to the protest. The play's main character is the immoral, corrupt and brutal warden.

Williams wrote the play as the expose to the crime. The opening scenes occur in the warden office where a young woman Eva Crane has come applying for a secretarial job. Other scenes shift to the prison cells. It is not easy to read this play, and probably more difficult to see it performed, knowing the history. The setting of the play is a compilation of prisons, and in the dramatic story, the play reflects mostly something like Alcatraz, as we read of the surrounding water.

The play is not overly lengthy, as it reads with 163 pages, but the lines are double spaced. This is an excellent, sad and disturbing read.....Rizzo

Tennessee Williams is one of my favorite playwrights because he was not afraid to define the stage and setting as much as the story and characters. Not About Nightingales is a great example of this. I performed in my high school's production of this play (we cut the gay character, welcome to surburbia...) although in a minor role, Shapiro. I think the staging guidance that Williams provides is great, and the core story is also very effective at illustrating the terrible conditions in prisons at the time the book was written.

However, there are lines that make me wince. Eva, the only female with any development, is stereotypical and has some horrendous lines here and there. "Explosions are such a...waste...of energy." It reads badly, and sounds worse on stage. There are others, with most of the major characters. These grate on the nerves when you're trying to believe in the intense drama that otherwise pervades the work.

Also, it's possible to see that Williams was indeed a younger writer when he wrote this than other works like The Glass Menagerie. His minor characters have no development whatsoever, and exist simply to portary the variety of races and ethnicities effected by poor prison conditions. Shapiro, for instance, is Jewish. At one point, dying, he says, "My people are used to suffering." Perhaps, but this sounds more like a Rabbi than a prisoner. The spanish prisoner, Mex, is essentially the same. Queenie, the gay character, is just...well...outrageously effeminate. It's hard to believe he survived his first few weeks in prison. I'd rather see more development of Butch/Jim and Jim/Eva. The lead roles in this play are great parts. Conflict is real and omnipresent for them. Jim and Butch are characters I'll remember forever. The Warden, too, is a great sadistic villian.

You have to make a leap of faith with this book, but it's worth the effort. If you can see the play professionally, do it.

I love this play. I was fortunate enough to get to see it in New York with the entire original cast. The writting is beautiful. The play is so masterfully written that you won't want it to end. It's complete with the perfect ending, the perfect opening, the right amount of comedy and tragedy, and spectacular dialogue. The play is wonderfully engaging, and I would love to see it again. The characters are so clearly written and each have a life of their own. Get the play -- it's a masterpiece.