Review: Williamstown Theatre Festival Revives Tennessee Williams’s Forgotten Prison Drama Not About Nightingales

No play I’ve seen thus far in 2025 rivals the prescience of Tennessee Williams’s Not About Nightingales. Written in 1938, when Williams was just 27, this savage and unrelenting call for prison reform feels so eerily timely that it could have been penned yesterday. Rejected by the socially conscious Group Theater in 1939, it was left unproduced until Vanessa Redgrave famously “discovered” it in the 1990s while researching a different Williams play. Its 1999 Broadway premiere heralded the work as a lost masterpiece—and yet, it remains so rarely produced that Williamstown Theatre Festival’s current revival marks the first time in our 25-year history that Not About Nightingales has been reviewed on this website.

While Not About Nightingales has just as much—if not more—to offer than the Williams plays that get produced every few seasons, it’s easy to see why it gets passed up for more comfortable fare like those old standbys The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. Ceaselessly grim, offering few instances of levity and even fewer moments of hope, it’s essentially based on the true story of four Pennsylvania prison inmates who were roasted to death in a steam-heated jail cell as punishment for going on a hunger strike. Not the kind of fare that you expect to watch during an idyllic weekend in the Berkshires.

So, props to WTF. Taking the risk in doing it—and hiring Robert O’Hara to direct, and casting William Jackson Harper, Chris Messina, Elizabeth Lail, and Brian Geraghty in the leading roles—has paid off like a slot machine. O’Hara has created a blistering, unmissable revival where the action is in your face—and so is the soul-crushing despair.

Williams depicts two contrasting worlds, the cell block and the warden’s office. In the cellblock, the tyrannical Butch O’Fallon (Geraghty) uses fear and intimidation to coerce his fellow inmates into striking for better provisions. Below, the equally cruel Warden Whalen (Messina) enforces his own brand of tyranny, wielding a rubber hose whip nicknamed Doctor Jones and the looming threat of the “Klondike,” a basement hell where the radiators blaze at 150 degrees.

Caught in the crossfire are Canary Jim (Jackson), a convict who has spent the last decade serving as Whalen’s stoolie, provoking the ire of his fellow prisoners, and Eva (Lail), Whalen’s desperate new secretary who finds herself falling for Jim while naively blinding herself to the atrocities happening just steps away. It all comes to a crescendo when Whalen sends the prisoners to the Klondike as retribution for their misbehavior—and the walls of scenic designer Diggle’s imposing, metallic prison rise to reveal the scariest inferno imaginable.

Throughout Not About Nightingales, you see early stylistic flourishes that would go on to become central to Williams’s later works. The lyrical, writerly Jim predates Tom Wingfield, but both are stuck in prisons, one literal, one not. It’s impossible not to see elements of Stanley Kowalski and Big Daddy in Whalen, and Butch is equal parts Stanley, Blanche, and even Brick. It was pretty much Williams’s only attempt at true social critique, and it’s a fascinating example of what could have been, had he continued to follow the popular polemical style of writers like Clifford Odets, instead of finding his own poetical path.

There’s a homosexual frankness to the script that was practically unheard of in 1938—one character is even called Queen (David Mattar Merten is beautifully pathetic in the tragic supporting role)—but O’Hara adds a greater intensity. Butch has a fantasy woman on the outside and now a prag on the inside, and Geraghty expertly plays both sides of the coin without letting down the brutal exterior.

At its heart, Not About Nightingales is a prison melodrama with a hint of noir, a world harshly conjured on stage. Scenic designer Diggle, costume designer Sophia Choi, and especially lighting designer Alex Jainchill create a shadowy, grayscale world with few pops of real color until the devastating climax. Scene changes are underscored by exaggerated orchestral music from sound designer Palmer Hefferan. And for a play where the actors could fall back into tropes quite easily, all the performances tow the fine line between heightened and realistic, with excellent results.

Messina doesn’t portray Whalen as a cartoonish villain, but as a believably repugnant, everyday tyrant who crumbles when the pressure mounts. Though Eva is more a plot device than a fully fleshed-out character, Lail imbues her with human desperation that makes her moral compromise understandable. She becomes a self-sabotaging tragic heroine, undone by circumstance and choice. But the greatest dramatic payoff comes from Harper’s quietly electrifying turn as the pragmatic Jim. His performance is layered and deeply thoughtful in how it builds to a shattering emotional payoff.

Running just over three hours, the production could benefit from a slightly faster pace here and there, mainly due to the absence of scenic automation. But it’s consistently absorbing and, at its best, as exhilarating as theater gets. O’Hara acutely understands the play’s polemical style without overdoing it, letting Williams’s writing speak for itself. He gives the audience space to draw their own conclusions, rather than underlining it for us. If history tells us anything, it’s that you’re unlikely to see Not About Nightingales again. If you have the chance to get to Williamstown before August 3, take it, if only to have a rare encounter with a forgotten masterpiece that was way ahead of its time.