ABSTRACT
Locked away and forgotten for more than fifty years in the archives of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Not About Nightingales (1938) has a history of neglect and obscurity that seems fitting for its subject matter: prison.2 Tennessee Williams wrote this play, which remained unperformed until its 1998 London premiere, as an impassioned response to the 1938 ‘Klondike’ massacre at the Philadelphia County Prison in Holmesburg, Pennsylvania. According to Newsweek in September of that year, twenty-five prisoners were locked into small cells ‘equipped with a bank of steam radiators nearly sufficient to heat a baby skyscraper’ and ‘given the Heat’ for instigating a hunger strike that involved 650 of the 1,481 prisoners (‘Prison Scandal’, 1938, 10). Four men (Henry Osborn, Frank Comodeca, John Walters, and James McQuade) ‘had been baked to death. Their hearts had been shrunk to half normal size by the process of dehydration’ (10). With this horrific event as subject matter, Williams places Not About Nightingales in the style of both 1930s proletarian drama, such as Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty (1935) and Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (1939), and the work of the Federal Theatre Project (1935-39), a New Deal program that funded the writers, actors, and directors of live performance during the Great Depression.3 Yet Williams’ play is not merely theatre of social protest;
it also uses captivity to dramatize a tension between masculinity and art as the protagonist, ‘Canary’ Jim, struggles for both literal and creative freedom.
