Tuesday, April 21, 1998 | 9:08 a.m.
LONDON - A virtually unknown work written by Tennessee Williams in 1938 is causing a major stir at the Royal National Theater. The play, "Not About Nightingales," is being seen not merely as a fine production from the National's new artistic director, Trevor Nunn, but also as one that extends critical understanding of Williams.
Nunn's staging, his first of a Williams play, opened on March 5 in the National's studio-size Cottesloe auditorium, where it plays in repertory through April 30. It then has its American premiere at the Alley Theater in Houston, opening on June 10 for a month's run. After that, the course is unclear. A New York engagement is a strong option, Nunn said, as are a return to a larger National auditorium and a British television version.
The focus on the play 15 years after its author's death allows a glimpse of Williams in angry, impassioned, even expressionistic mode, at age 27 writing for the Group Theater (by whom it was rejected) and coming up with the sort of socially minded theatrical rallying cry that was associated with Clifford Odets. Intended as a "living newspaper" that might document and respond to prison system injustices of the day, the play nonetheless contains the embryos of important figures from the less politicized Williams canon. It's difficult not to regard Canary Jim, the play's young convict and sometime stoolie, as a version of Tom in "The Glass Menagerie," the poet-narrator who shares Jim's fierce romanticism. Similarly, Butch O'Fallon, leader of the uprising in the unnamed prison where the play is set, emerges as an amalgam of both Stanley and Blanche: the apparent aggressor whose burly machismo hides a fragile spirit.
But none of these considerations would have been possible nor would the play have ever reached the National without the persistence of Vanessa Redgrave. Ms. Redgrave began her search for the text when she was appearing in the West End in 1989 in Peter Hall's revival of Williams's "Orpheus Descending." While preparing for that role, Ms. Redgrave found a foreword by Williams, published in 1957, in which he spoke admiringly of the earlier play and "the violence and horror" that it exposed. "Basically, anybody could have found the play," Ms. Redgrave said. "I was the only person who was determined to find it."
Why the persistence? "I just was very deeply, deeply tuned in to Tennessee for a very long time; it was strictly because of that. Being Tennessee, I knew he must have written something very great, and he did, in my view."
The actress's quest began with Williams's literary executor, Maria St. Just (now dead), who was able to unearth a manuscript. And it continued at the Harry Ransome Humanities Center at the University of Texas at Austin, when Ms. Redgrave and her brother Corin were in nearby Houston early in 1996 performing in two plays in repertory as part of their Moving Theater Company. At the National, the Williams play is a co-production with the Redgraves' company, in association with the Alley Theater. And while Ms. Redgrave does not appear in it, her brother takes the leading role of Butch O'Fallon's autocratic nemesis, Boss Whalen, a prison warden whose authoritarian impulses always coexist with fearful self-knowledge.
The danger, of course, was that the play would not merit Ms. Redgrave's extensive legwork. Zealous excavations of writers' early work or esoterica don't always enhance their reputations. In this case, three manuscripts of the play existed, and in addition, Nunn had to achieve a balance between honoring the piece as Williams conceived it, warts and all, and needing to smooth it out, maybe rewrite it even, for contemporary consumption. "It's a task of scholarship," Nunn said, "and in that vein one wants to be as truthful as possible to what one can divine of a young writer's intentions." But, he continued, "it's very important that a group of people don't go in 60 years later saying, 'How can we make this more readily accessible, or apologize for its tone, or obscure what appears to be archaic?' It's crucial to be able to say that we're presenting Tennessee's state of mind, his state of preparedness, immediately before he wrote 'The Glass Menagerie.' " (Like that later play, "Not About Nightingales" uses titles for all its 22 scenes, or "episodes.")
In any case, Nunn had confronted such issues before in the works of Shakespeare. "Every time you do a Shakespeare play," he said, "your first set of decisions is what play are you going to do, because you've got good and bad quartos, folio variants, first folios: a huge array of editorial notes. I've done in my time far more ruthless surgery with Shakespeare than anything that has happened to Tennessee's play."
According to Corin Redgrave, only one word was changed from Williams's original: "balmy" to "sticky" so as to accentuate a coarse sexual joke that Butch early on makes at Jim's expense. Otherwise, he said, "I think we didn't succumb to any urge to improve," adding, "To my mind, it's an astonishingly confident piece of work, and considering that Tennessee wasn't - at the point he wrote it - getting much encouragement, it finds its feet securely and surely."
What are the implications of the play's success? "It maintains interest in Tennessee," said Tom Erhardt, the London-based American who acts as worldwide agent for the Williams estate. It also proves once again Britain's continuing, often revelatory fascination with Williams's lesser-known works, not just the self-evident masterpieces that are often done on both sides of the Atlantic.
Currently in repertory at the Royal Shakespeare Company is a rare production of Williams's 1953 "Camino Real," directed by Steven Pimlott, while Erhardt spoke of trying to put together a local production of "The Notebook of Trigorin," which had its premiere in Cincinnati two years ago. In addition, Erhardt said, he hopes the acclaim for "Not About Nightingales" will prompt interest in "Tennessee's other so-called 'apprentice plays,' those plays written in the '30s and early '40s before his success with 'Menagerie' and 'Streetcar."'
Nunn said: "We're first of all correcting the notion that Tennessee sprang fully formed out of nowhere as a writer of masterpieces; of course he didn't, any more than Arthur Miller did or Shakespeare did. The apprenticeship is long and fascinating, and what the writer rejects is as interesting as what the writer chooses."
Ms. Redgrave said she was moved by the young Williams's refusal to be constricted by what is possible in the theater, even if it has now taken a major subsidized theater to produce a work with a cast of 18 and a complex physical design. "I often hear it said that you've got to be prepared to work in the theater as it is," Ms. Redgrave said, "but actually you must never work for things as they are but for things as they could and might be. Tennessee didn't write for the limitations of whatever theater he thought might be able to do it; he wrote what he saw in his mind's eye, and that's the only way we push the frontiers of theater forward."
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