Not About Nightingales - Softcover

Tennessee; Hale Allean Williams

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0413722805 ISBN 13: 9780413722805

Publisher: Methuen Drama, 1998

Synopsis

Not About Nightingales, never before produced or published, is an early play by the 27-year-old Tom Williams and the first play to carry his signature pen-name 'Tennessee'. It was rescued from Williams' archive by the actress Vanessa Redgrave Written in 1938 and based on an actual newspaper story, the play follows the events of a prison scandal which shocked America when convicts leading a hunger strike were locked in a steam-heated cell and roasted to death. Williams later said: 'I have never written anything since that could compete with its violence and horror.'

About this title

About the Author

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) is the acclaimed author of many books of letters, short stories, poems, essays, and a large collection of plays, including The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, The Night of the Iguana, and The Rose Tattoo.

From Booklist

Written in 1938 when Williams was 27, still living at home and a good six years away from Broadway, Not about Nightingales is as much writing exercise as fully realized drama. It lacks the originality and depth of The Glass Menagerie, written only a few years later, and his later masterworks. Nevertheless, it is of considerable interest, not least because it was inspired by a real occurrence in which several unruly prisoners were cooked alive as punishment. And after all, it is Williams' first full-length play and first play written under the pen name Tennessee, and it sufficiently impressed Elia Kazan of the Group Theater, to which Williams sent it in response to a playwriting contest, that he introduced Williams to the New York agent Audrey Wood, who would make his career. Reading the play, most of which is in the thuddingly obvious politically conscious style of Depression-era theater, one notices in brief, brilliant passages and in the intensity of his characters the Williams to come. And that makes it worthwhile. Jack Helbig

About this edition

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0413722805
• ISBN 13: 9780413722805
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80