Not About Nightingales
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Not About Nightingales is a three-act play by Tennessee Williams. He wrote the play late in 1938, after reading in a newspaper about striking inmates of a Holmesburg, Pennsylvania prison in August 1938, who had been placed in "an isolation unit lined with radiators, where four died from temperatures approaching 150 degrees.".[1]
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The play focuses on a group of inmates who go on a hunger strike. There is also a love story, with the characters Eva, the new secretary at the prison, and Jim, a handsome inmate who works for the warden and is trying to get out on parole.
In February 1939, Williams submitted the play to the Group Theatre in New York City, but they rejected it.[2] Not About Nightingales remained unperformed and unpublished until the late 1990s when Vanessa Redgrave made it her personal mission to track the play down. It had its world premiere at the Alley Theatre in Houston in 1998 and was published the same year by New Directions, with a foreword by Redgrave.