“It’s like seeing Michelangelo’s true colors, after they’ve cleaned the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.”
His comparison does not quite hold water, and, even at that, he’s stretching it a bit; but Gregory Boyd, artistic director of the Alley Theatre here, is entitled to his bit of exaggeration.
For the next three weeks, through July 3, his theater is playing host to the world premiere production of what can legitimately be called a new work by the late, great American playwright Tennessee Williams.
The drama, written in 1938 when Williams was 27 and still going by his given name of Thomas, is “Not About Nightingales,” a florid, three-hour prison melodrama very much of its Depression-era period.
But, staged to a fare-thee-well by director Trevor Nunn, it is a fascinating look at Williams in his earliest, formative stage as a writer. And, even if you don’t know a thing about Williams or his work, the play remains, like the Big House movies of the ’30s it resembles, a rousing good show.
The journey of “Not About Nightingales” from the obscurity of the archives to the dynamism of the living stage was made possible by a combination of detective work, scholarship, painstaking reconstruction, delicate negotiation and good old theatrical showboating.
It began almost a decade ago when Vanessa Redgrave, an actress hugely admired by Williams, read a reference by the playwright to “the violence and horror” of his early, never-produced work. Redgrave, tenacious in her curiosity, asked Maria St. Just, Williams’ literary executor, if she could locate a copy of the play; and, so the story goes, one day St. Just plopped an incomplete version of the script down on a kitchen table in front of the amazed actress.
The play, only briefly mentioned by Williams’ biographers, was started as an exercise in writing a “living newspaper” kind of docudrama while Williams was attending a playwriting seminar at the the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
For the exercise, Williams chose a news story about a Pennsylvania prison revolt in which four rebellious inmates had been locked inside a steam radiator-lined cage bitterly named “Klondike” and literally cooked to death.
Having finished the assignment, Williams decided to further develop it, a task he took to with ferocity. His biographer, Lyle Leverich, quotes Williams’ journal: “(The play) may be very good or very bad — I don’t know — haven’t read it yet — just writing, writing — drinking coffee nearly every day — and feeling well in spite of it.”
In 1938, the young writer entered a few of his plays, including “Not About Nightingales,” in a competiton sponsored by the Group Theatre in New York. Age limit for the contestants was 25, so Williams changed his birth date from 1911 to 1914, and, to further give himself a new identity, changed his name from Tom to Tennessee.
He did not win the competition; and Williams, who was never to write a pure social protest drama again, did not go back to “Not About Nightingales.” It remained buried in his papers.
In 1991, however, when the still-curious Redgrave was filming in Texas, she made it a point to search among the Williams papers in the Harry Ransome Humanities Center at the University of Texas in Austin. And there, in type-script, was the essential, basically complete text of “Not About Nightingales.”
Five years later, while she and her brother Corin were appearing with their Moving Theatre company at the Alley in two Shakespeare plays, Redgrave, looking to continue her company’s association with the Alley, brought the script to Boyd.
“There was the basic text,” Boyd recalls, “and at the end of it, there were two fantasy scenes, with no indication if or where they should be in the play.” (According to Boyd, Nunn inserted the two sequences in the script where he believed they would be most effective; and, later, when a slightly different version of the text was found, these turned out to be the exact places where Williams had placed them.)
“Vanessa and I read the play together,” Boyd recalls. “We agreed it should be put on stage, and, since we wanted to do a modern play for our next project, we decided to go ahead.”
Next problem: Who was to direct this expressionistic, realistic, almost cinematic play that the budding playwright had so feverishly conceived?
Redgrave went to Nunn, who in 1997 was about to take over as the new artistic director of the Royal National Theatre in London. Nunn read the play, and “without any hesitation,” Boyd says, the famed director agreed to stage the play, in his first crack at a Williams drama, at the National Theatre’s small Cottesloe auditorium.
Its premiere there last March created a sensation, provoking such bizarre review headlines as “Prisoner: Cell Block Ouch” and “A Steam Bath Named Despair.” It became a sell-out success in London, and early this month, after negotiations with the Actors Equity union, the play, with its complete Anglo-American cast, had its American premiere in Houston.
To recreate the National production, designer Kevin Rigdon (a former Chicagoan now resettled in Houston as an Alley associate artist), carved out a 440-seat space in a former convention center that pretty well duplicated the staging at the Cottesloe.
Here, in designer Richard Hoover’s setting, the audience has been placed on the two long sides of an oblong playing area. At one end of the stage lies Cell Block C, where the desperate prisoners and their bullying leader Butch O’Fallon (James Black) are trapped. At the other end, opposing and confronting the cell site, lies the office of the alcoholic warden, Boss Whalen.
The events surrounding the prison riot are told by Williams (and staged by Nunn) in a manner reminiscent of an old James Cagney movie. Tough guys, squealers, beatings and brute labor are mixed with a dewy romance between the warden’s innocent secretary and a handsome, stout-hearted con up for parole.
But these cliches of the period are written in a style and with a talent that unmistakably foreshadows the Williams work to come.
The author’s imprint is obvious from the start, in the bird imagery in his play’s title. The writer who would later create “Sweet Bird of Youth” and “Eccentricities of a Nightingale” makes reference to nightingales here in the words of Canary Jim, the heroic prisoner wrongly suspected of being a “canary,” or squealer. As with many of Williams’ young gallants, Jim (the steely Irish actor Finbar Lynch) is a flawed, scarred person in desperate straits, but vulnerable and imbued with a touch of the poet. A man in love with five-syllable words, he scorns romantic poems such as John Keats’ ode “To a Nightingale” and vows, when he gets out of prison, that whatever he writes, it will not be about nightingales. “Living,” in Jim’s bitter words, “is the slow process of dying.”
But Eva Crane (ardently portrayed by Sherri Parker Lee), the unemployed shop girl who becomes the warden’s secretary, knows better. Like so many Williams heroines, she is a fragile creature with infinite romantic yearnings, and it is she who sees and responds to the tender lover beneath Jim’s laconic exterior.
Boss Whalen is the first of many overwhelming elders in Williams plays whose job it is to confound and torture the young hero. Played in the grand manner by Corin Redgrave as a cross between Richard III and Snidely Whiplash, he gives the play a roaring dimension of theatricality.
Nunn’s staging constantly stresses Williams’ dramatic touches, such as the use of supertitles to label each scene — and the director adds a few tricks of his own. Adapting design techniques he either invented or refined in such blockbusters as “Les Miserables,” “Cats” and “Nicholas Nickleby,” Nunn creates a hellish world of prison life as the cons are shuffled back and forth through their cages, as they sweat in the unendurable steam heat of “Klondike,” and as they finally explode into the warden’s office for their bloody revenge.
The play never escapes the squishy sentimentality and cliches of its genre. But even here, as with the stock characters in the cell block, Williams adds a unique quality. Queenie, the black homosexual fretting over his manicure kit, is portrayed with great sympathy; and one of the prisoners, an old Jew mocked as “the Yid” by the guards, startlingly forecasts the victims of the Holocaust in World War II.
These Big House melodramas still have their gut-wrenching power too. We may find them outdated, but, as Williams undoubtedly knew when he wrote “Not About Nightingales,” they have the ability to hold our attention through the extreme behavior of heroism and villainy they display.
The play, when it finishes its Houston run, will most likely go on to a limited commercial run in New York. And, even with a large cast of 18 actors, it has the chance to be produced by resident theaters across the country.
Thanks to Redgrave, Boyd and Nunn, it gives us an intriguing glimpse of Williams’ work, before he entered his great, flowering period with “The Glass Menagerie” in 1944.
It has been quite an adventure.
