Not About Nightingales: A Staged Reading
by Tennessee Williams

The Vancouver premiere of Tennessee Williams' lost play.

"..a tension filled performance!"

"This is a powerful and well produced stage reading of this compelling play."

"If this is what Mad Duck productions is about let us hope that there will be many more of this high calibre."
Jane Penistan, reviewvancouver.org

In 1938, when Tom Williams read the newspaper article reporting a riot and prisoner torture in a Philadelphia County prison which was to be the basis for his fourth full length play, Not About Nightingales, he was a talented young playwright, but a playwright still struggling to find his own unique voice. With Nightingales he would begin the metamorphosis from Tom to Tennessee, though he would wait almost another decade for the professional and artistic success of A Streetcar Named Desire and its Pulitzer Prize, his first.

This is a raw, sprawling dramatization of real events at a Philadelphia prison in 1937. Convicts who led a hunger strike to protest conditions were locked in a scalding cell where four of them died. The sympathetic treatment of blacks and homosexuals is revolutionary for this time and may explain why the play remained un produced for sixty years.