A journey into hell with Williams's ‘Not About Nightingales'
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O'Hara helmed the 2019 Broadway production of 'Slave Play,' by Jeremy O. Harris, who is currently Williamstown's creative director. O'Hara is also a playwright of note. His
With its intermittent flights into melodrama, its homoerotic subtext, and its lyricism, 'Nightingales' is recognizably a Tennessee Williams play. (With Williams, even the script's stage directions possess a certain lyricism.) It is also recognizably a Tennessee Williams play in the concision and vividness of its character portraits.
O'Hara keeps the story grounded, even gritty, with an intensity of focus that largely prevents any drift — an ever-present danger in a drama that features 16 characters.
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Written in 1938 and inspired by a hunger strike by 650 inmates at a penitentiary in Holmesberg, Pa., 'Nightingales' was Williams's fourth full-length play. He considered 'Nightingales' the best play he had written up to that point in his career.
He also thought it was one of the most wrenching. In a foreword to the publication of his 1957 'Orpheus Descending,' Williams wrote of 'Nightingales' that 'I have never written anything since then that could compete with it in violence and horror.'
The Williamstown cast includes William Jackson Harper — who played the fretful ethicist Chidi Anagonye on NBC's 'The Good Place' — as a prisoner who was brutally treated by the prison's warden and now works for him. Jim is slowly drawn into a romance with Eva (Elizabeth Lail), the warden's new secretary. A haunting figure is Jack (Ben Getz), an inmate whose experiences in prison have led to the disintegration of his mind.
Brian Geraghty is the Stanley Kowalski-like convict Butch, all alpha-male aggression and dominance. It is Butch who leads the hunger strike as a form of protest against the nearly inedible food they are served each day. Chris Messina is the creepy Warden Whelan, abusing power in every way he can, the most detestable warden since Bob Gunton's Warden Norton in 'The Shawshank Redemption.'
Williams was only 27 when he wrote 'Nightingales,' finishing it in 1938 — two years before his 'Battle of Angels' became his first professionally produced play in a calamitous train-wreck of a production at Boston's Wilbur Theatre.
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His emphasis in 'Nightingales' on social injustice and the politics undergirding that injustice is notable. He dedicated the play to the memory of Clarence Darrow, whom he called 'The Great Defender, whose mental frontiers were the four corners of the sky.'
The play languished in obscurity until Vanessa Redgrave became its champion. It was presented in 1998 as a coproduction by the National Theater of London and the Alley Theater of Houston. The next year, 'Nightingales' moved to Broadway, where it had a short run but garnered half a dozen Tony Award nominations.
'Nightingales' was reportedly the first full-length play where Thomas Lanier Williams signed a script as 'Tennessee Williams.' Many impressive accomplishments would eventually be attached to that name, and 'Not About Nightingales' should be counted among them.
NOT ABOUT NIGHTINGALES
Play by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Robert O'Hara. Presented by Williamstown Theatre Festival. On the NikosStage, Williamstown. Through Aug. 3. Tickets $20-$100. 413-458-3253,
Don Aucoin can be reached at
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