A Sweatbox Named Desire

By Richard Zoglin

In 1938, when he was still struggling to find his voice as a playwright, Tom Williams, 27, read a newspaper account of four inmates at a Pennsylvania prison who died after being left to roast inside a superheated chamber dubbed "Klondike." The story spurred him to expand a one-act play he had written about prison life to a full-length drama he titled Not About Nightingales. Williams entered the play in a contest for young dramatists held by the famed Group Theatre. (Since he was two years over the age limit, he lied about his birth date and signed with a pseudonym--Tennessee, after the state where his grandparents lived. The name stuck.) Williams won a $100 prize for some one-acts he also submitted. But Not About Nightingales was ignored and never produced.

A half-century later, Vanessa Redgrave came to the rescue. While researching her role in Williams' Orpheus Descending a few years ago, the actress discovered a reference the playwright made to his forgotten early work: "I have never written anything since then that could compete with it in violence and horror." She tracked down the manuscript at the University of Texas and eventually showed it to Trevor Nunn, the acclaimed British director (Nicholas Nickleby; Cats) who is now artistic director of London's Royal National Theatre. Nunn's first reaction was surprise that there was no role in it for Redgrave. Her unearthing of the play "was a completely philanthropic gesture," he marvels. His second reaction was that he wanted to stage it.

Nunn's production had its premiere in London in March, and (with the same cast, a mix of British and American actors) is making its American debut at Houston's Alley Theatre. It is a startling theatrical discovery: an impassioned social drama that is as far as one can imagine from the more personal, lyrical style that Williams introduced a few years later in The Glass Menagerie. The earlier play is something of a mess--more than three hours long, with too many characters and subplots, overwrought melodramatics and snippets of dialogue that sound like, well, bad Tennessee Williams (Girl to Guy: "Why don't you ever open the door you're hiding behind?"). But in Nunn's taut, forceful staging, the work is more than a footnote for Williams scholars; it's an evening of crude but often astonishing power.

The young playwright shows the unlikely influence of such left-wing dramatists of the era as Clifford Odets. But he must have sat through quite a few Warner Bros. prison films of the '30s as well. Not About Nightingales is paced like a movie, with short scenes that skip willy-nilly from warden's office to cell block, from mess hall to prison yard. The warden (played with fine, greasy intensity by Corin Redgrave, Vanessa's brother) is a sadistic dictator with no redeeming features. The convicts include a bullet-headed tough guy who organizes a hunger strike (James Black); a sympathetically rendered homosexual called Queenie (Jude Akuwudike); and the inevitable "new boy" (Mark Dexter), who arrives at the prison with dreams of running on the U.S. Olympic team--and winds up crippled by the brutal guards.

Two characters occupy the play's more complex moral center: the warden's new secretary (Sherri Parker Lee), who can't reveal the brutality she sees for fear of losing a job she desperately needs, and a convict called Canary Jim (Finbar Lynch), who has ingratiated himself with the warden by ratting on other inmates. Jim is the most recognizable Williams character, a stunted romantic who scoffs at Keats (when he starts writing, Jim vows, it won't be about nightingales) yet proves himself an idealist in a pinch.

Nunn has done a masterly job of taming this unruly work. The audience sits, theater-in-the-round style, on opposing sides of a long stage. At one end is a two-level block of cells; at the other, the warden's office, where every prop--desk, telephone, picture frames, even the American flag--is a grim steel gray. He doesn't soften the melodramatic excesses, yet he emphasizes the metaphorical overtones. There are references to Mussolini and Hitler ("that monkey with the trick mustache"); a Jewish convict laments, "I come of a people that are used to suffer"; and the harrowing scenes in the prison's steamy torture chamber are an eerie foreshadowing of Auschwitz.

But one doesn't have to read the play as an antifascist allegory to feel its impact as an old-fashioned protest drama, which scores like a young heavyweight with no footwork but a crushing left hand. What's amazing is how shocking the play's depiction of human brutality remains even today, 60 years and several Quentin Tarantino films later. For Williams, the discipline and the poetry were yet to come. But he already had the gift.