A long-neglected Tennessee Williams play gets its moment to shine with a starry cast

Boston Globe

16-07-2025

'I believe in theater doing the most. Because our lives are the most,' director Robert O'Hara says in a Zoom interview from
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'We can't just live one portion of our lives. I can't just be a Black man. I'm also a queer man. I'm also a man of a certain age. I'm also an American,' O'Hara says.
Williams based his play on an infamous instance of carceral brutality: Four men confined to a Philadelphia prison died after being locked in a room that was deliberately heated to lethal levels. Prison authorities put them there as punishment for participating in a hunger strike protesting conditions.
A similar scenario unspools in 'Nightingales.' The story requires a large ensemble, but much of the action turns on the fraught relationship between an inmate named Jim and the prison's sadistic warden.
Actor William Jackson Harper was inspired to play Jim for one overriding reason.
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'I'm scared of it. I don't really know how I'm supposed to play this part,' Harper says over the phone before a rehearsal.
Harper earned his commercial breakthrough (and an Emmy nomination) with his much-loved turn on NBC's '
The prison setting of 'Nightingales' and Williams' use of period vernacular and speech patterns emulating those of 1930s Hollywood films make his role an 'experiment,' Harper says.
'It's about trying to play something outside of the things I would usually be considered for, or that are considered my strengths or my habits — trying to develop things that I feel a little more vulnerable about,' he adds.
Chris Messina, who excelled as the handsome jerk on TV series including 'Six Feet Under,' '
Williams never saw a production of 'Nightingales,' which went unpublished during his lifetime. Clued in by a decades-old reference to the play, Dame Vanessa Redgrave asked Williams' literary executor to unearth the manuscript for a 1998 staging at London's Royal National Theatre directed by Trevor Nunn. The production went to Broadway the next year.
The New York production was too 'polite' for O'Hara's taste.
'Tennessee Williams was one messy homosexual. This is a man who had lots of lovers, who was addicted to pills later on in his life. [Other productions] seem to try and clean up his work. I want to acknowledge the messiness,' O'Hara says.
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The director is not afraid to give sacred cows a good smack on the rump.
His radically reconstructed 'Hamlet' last month at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum posited Fortinbras of Norway, a character cut from many modern productions, as a detective spawned from film noir who investigates the mass killing that concludes the play. 'Nightingales' will hew closely to the text but be told 'through a contemporary lens,' O'Hara says.
The production makes overt much of the homoerotic subtext that Williams layered into his story of men locked together in a cage, insisting on their own humanity.
'This play is very much a response to an injustice,' Harper says, 'but it isn't a piece of documentary theater. It's the work of someone who's inspired and just going for it.'
Casting a Black actor as Jim — a role Williams envisioned as a white man,— adds another complication to a play bristling with contemporary relevance.
'Putting our two bodies on stage is going to create a certain energy,' Harper says of himself and Messina, 'and introduce a lot of dynamics. The way this warden behaves toward Jim, it's almost coded as if Jim was a Black man. There's a lot of language that becomes explicitly racist with this casting.'
It all adds up to a tragic mess that remains stubbornly timely.
'At a time where we're rounding up immigrants and sending them overseas to prisons and throwing away the key,' O'Hara says, 'and we see the atrocities of the prison-industrial complex daily, I think it's very clear that how we treat those we confine tells a lot about our society.'
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NOT ABOUT NIGHTINGALES
Williamstown Theatre Festival, NikosStage Theater at the '62 Center. July 17 - August 2. Tickets: $100 or as part of a weekend pass; [phone],