Redgraves to the Rescue

In 1980, Vanessa Redgrave met Tennessee Williams. The writer, once regarded as the enfant terrible of stage and film, was at a low point in his career and, recognizing a kindred spirit in Redgrave, he hoped to interest her in “Stopped Rocking,” his screenplay about a woman whose husband had committed her to an asylum.

“I thought the script was absolutely superb,” Redgrave recalls. “But I was going through a very difficult time myself, when nobody wanted me very much either,” she says of a period when her far-left politics were regularly making headlines. “So the two of us got absolutely nowhere.”

Nearly two decades later, and years after Williams’ death in 1983, Redgrave has become the surprising agent of the playwright’s artistic rehabilitation, albeit as producer, not actress. “Not About Nightingales,” which Williams wrote in 1938, at age 27, opened recently on Broadway as a “new play” by Williams. The show, co-produced by Redgrave’s The Moving Theatre and starring her brother Corin at Circle in the Square Theater, scored the sort of critical approbation that had eluded the playwright during the last two bitter decades of his life. Praising director Trevor Nunn’s staging of the story of a prison atrocity as an “enthralling interpretation,” New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote that “a feverish, full-strength compassion for people in cages makes ‘Nightingales’ fly toward a realm of pain and beauty that is the province of greatness.”

Written seven years before “The Glass Menagerie” would establish Williams as one of the most promising American dramatists of his generation, “Nightingales” was one of the playwright’s early rejections. He would go on to write such classics as “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Night of the Iguana” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” but he never returned to this prison potboiler, and it might well have remained lost were it not for the dogged persistence of Vanessa Redgrave, who tracked it down in 1993 after seeing a reference to the play in an essay by Williams. Along with her brother, she nurtured the current production from its acclaimed world premiere at the Royal National Theatre in London last year to a subsequent engagement at Houston’s Alley Theatre, to its arrival on Broadway. The ghost of Williams seemed palpable at the Feb. 25 opening here, as the audience rose to give the cast a sustained standing ovation at curtain call. Redgrave could be glimpsed in the lobby afterward, brushing away tears.

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“It was extremely moving last night,” Redgrave said the morning after the opening, toasting the memory of her fellow renegade with Bloody Marys in the bar of the posh New York restaurant where she was meeting Corin for a celebration lunch. Wearing no makeup, rose-tinted, thick-lensed glasses and a conservative beige sweater and skirt, the actress seems to be settling into a sort of dotty, poetic seniority. Smoking cigarette after cigarette, she spins out elegant conversation in a gloriously husky voice, a muted passion countering her astringent public image.

One might expect that this most political of all Williams’ plays--born out of the social ferment of the Depression era that gave rise to the polemics of the Group Theatre and its foremost voice, Clifford Odets--would ring a responsive chord in a woman who once ran for Parliament on a radical-left ticket. But Redgrave said that political sensibilities are not what drew her to this brutal depiction of a despotic warden, whose harsh policies lead to a hunger strike that culminates in the torture of the ringleaders.

Noting that Williams had submitted “Not About Nightingales” to the Group Theatre but had been rejected by the activist theater organization, she said, “I think Tennessee was rejected because he didn’t fit into all their squared-off categories. The problem with active party politics from any quarter of any spectrum is that they don’t allow for the individual. [Williams] chose to concentrate on the personal interrelations of the characters, and that wasn’t popular at the time, and that’s why the Group didn’t accept his plays.

“When I first read the manuscript,” she continues, “I had to literally remind myself that this was a 27-year-old writing, because I felt as if the older Tennessee I knew was sitting at my elbow. And the thought came, how from [Tennessee’s] very youth, right up to the day he died, he retained this wonderfully pure, passionate spirit of outrage at the unkindness and cruelty and violence done by any human being to any other human being. Also his unique capacity I think for expressing great love and tenderness, these streaks of humanity that do emerge in the most unlikely people and in very lost people in the most unusual of circumstances. I just started weeping with joy and sadness and loss.”

According to the playwright’s own notes, which Redgrave later discovered in archives, Williams’ inspiration for “Not About Nightingales” came straight out of newspaper reports of actual events in a Pennsylvania prison. In 1938, four convicts, leaders of a hunger strike, were discovered to have been roasted alive in a 50-by-12-foot shed, ironically called “Klondike,” heated to nearly boiling temperatures by enormous radiators. The horrifying events led to a public outcry for prison reform. In response, Williams wrote his fourth full-length play in a fevered, caffeine-fueled creative fury over just eight days. At the time he was living in St. Louis with his parents, miserably trapped in a boring job in a shoe factory.

In alternating scenes between the warden’s office and the steel cages of the prison where its denizens go stir-crazy, the characters of “Not About Nightingales” carry the seeds of Williams’ future plays. Early on, in fact, is a line that emblematizes what would become the playwright’s leitmotif: “All my life I’ve been persecuted by people because I’m refined,” says the effeminate Queen, one of a cross section of prisoners who seemed to have come out of the stock characters from such prison B-movies of the time as “The Big House.” Other characters include Butch O’Fallon, the tough-as-nails ringleader of the prisoners, whose blunt tyranny in the cells parallels that of the sadistic warden, Boss Whalen; Eva Crane, the high-strung secretary whose financial desperation in the midst of the Depression gets a reprieve when she finally gets a job in Whalen’s office; and Canary Jim, a brooding poetic presence who becomes Whalen’s “stoolie” in order to speed up his parole.

It is Canary Jim who gives the play its title, when he derides John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” to Eva, with whom he will soon fall in love. Those “literary punks,” he tells her, should be writing about something more important and relevant. And he vows that when he wins his freedom, he will write--and “not about nightingales.”

Redgrave first discovered a reference to the long-lost play in 1988 when she was doing research for her first and only role in a Williams play, as Lady Torrance in “Orpheus Descending” for a production directed by Peter Hall that would play both on the West End and Broadway. In the foreword to the 1957 published version of the drama, Williams talked about what he considered the “best” of this early work. Starting in 1993, Redgrave began cajoling Lady Maria St. Just, the playwright’s longtime friend and literary executor of his estate, to find a copy of the play. Redgrave recalls that on a visit to St. Just at her palatial estate in a London suburb in the early ‘90s, her hostess tossed a manuscript at her. “There you are, Tall Girl,” she said.

“She produced it out of this wonderful Harrod’s shopping bag, and while sitting in her kitchen having some of her delicious mushroom soup, I devoured the play,” Redgrave says.

The actress continued her exploration of Williams’ original manuscripts and annotated versions of the play at the University of Texas at Austin while performing a repertory of Shakespeare plays at Houston’s Alley Theatre. She did this on behalf of the Moving Theatre Company, which she and Corin Redgrave founded in 1993 to present new and classic work of social relevance in collaboration with companies worldwide. A reciprocal partnership with the Alley called for the companies to collaborate on a production in London, and the Redgraves wanted to attempt “Not About Nightingales.”

They approached Nunn with the play, and after reading it, he immediately consented not only to direct but also to present it as part of his first season as artistic director of the Royal National Theatre. This was a fortuitous set of circumstances, since “Not About Nightingales” requires a cast of 18 to appear in 21 episodes, necessitating a long preparation and rehearsal time and the subsidies of nonprofit theaters like the Alley and Royal National. The two producing entities, along with a string of commercial producers, led by Carole Shorenstein Hays, are presenting the play on Broadway with the same mixed cast of American and English actors. Corin Redgrave plays the warden, Irish actor Finbar Lynch is Canary Jim, and Alley veterans James Black and Sherri Parker Lee are Butch and Eva, respectively.

When the show was being cast, Redgrave says that she asked Nunn if she could take the small role of the mother of one of the prisoners, “but he said, ‘Absolutely not,’ ” recalls the actress. “He said it would be throwing to the audience to see people they are used to playing leads in a little role. I would have loved to be in it, but I’m also extremely glad the role went to Sandra [Searles Dickinson]. It couldn’t be better done.”

Given the conservative temper of the present day, in which “tough-on-crime” policies are generally popular, the drama’s liberal sensibilities seem almost quaint, if not wildly unfashionable. While Redgrave decries the prevailing political and social landscape as “corrupt,’ she is hopeful that the play’s presence on Broadway indicates that people may be “hungering” for work that gives balance and insight into ethical issues, which she believes has been mostly missing from the discourse of late.

“That’s because a desensitizing took place among a whole lot of people,” she says. “I don’t think any of us are immune to those social circumstances that bring what I call a hardening of the arteries. At the same time, what is so striking about Tennessee is that there is not even a sniff of moralizing about him. Society punishes vindictively, because it moralizes, it puts itself as God when it is clearly far from anybody’s idea of God. But Tennessee’s not tainted. He explores the most human and the most inhuman of characters--and without judgment.”

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As Corin Redgrave arrives at the table to meet his sister, she is delighted that he is wearing the casual black jacket and scarf she gave him as an opening night present. “You mustn’t dry-clean, wash only, which will save a bit on the upkeep,” she says maternally.

Over a glass of Chardonnay, Corin Redgrave talks of the process of working on a play that had a number of slightly different versions in the archives. “There was a lot of head-scratching and wondering, ‘Well, what did Tennessee want or intend?’ ” he says. “Sooner or later you have to have an arbiter, usually the director, but in this case, the director pretended there was another ultimate arbiter with whom he was directly in touch with. Trevor would say, whenever he felt he hadn’t quite got sufficient ground for his choices, ‘I think Tennessee would have preferred this.’ ”

The creative team, he adds, was sensitive to preserving the spirit of the work, even if some passages might strike contemporary audiences as overwritten, purple in its cadences and melodramatic. “The path he treads from melodrama of truth and melodrama of effect, which is bad melodrama, is always very, very sure.” Corin Redgrave says. “I think it’s an astonishingly mature piece of work.”

Both brother and sister say they hope the success of “Nightingales” might lead to more reassessments of the playwright’s work. Vanessa would like to see a film of “Stopped Rocking” finally be produced, and she and her brother are developing a film version of Williams’ “Two-Character Play,” also known as “Outcry,” an impressionistic work that hints at an incestuous relationship between a brother and sister and which was a Broadway flop in the 1979.

In “Not About Nightingales,” there remains an open question as to whether or not Canary Jim survives the bloody denouement of the play. Asked whether in their view the poetic young man does indeed survive to be reunited with his love, both Redgraves agree that the possibility of redemption is what is key--what Corin characterizes through an image from Williams’ “Camino Real,” which he once directed--the idea of “violets breaking through the rocks,” the miracle of life in the midst of a harsh world.

Responding that the “largeness of spirit” of both Canary Jim and Tennessee Williams does manage to survive--of which this Broadway revival itself is evidence--Vanessa pulls out from her bag an opening present from a friend. It’s a vintage 1962 copy of Williams on the cover of Time looking pensive and healthy, just before the ravages of alcohol, pills and age would catch up with him.

“My friend sent me the magazine with a card with this inscription,” Vanessa says, reading a quote from the prophet Isaiah. “ ‘He has sent me to build up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of prisons to them that are bound.’ ”

She pauses. “That’s sort of Tennessee too, isn’t it?”

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“Not About Nightingales,” Circle in the Square, 50th and Broadway, New York. Telecharge: (800) 432-7250.