Nightingales in a Hot Tin Cage: "Not About Nightingales"—A Forgotten Play by Tennessee Williams
Joanna Majewska
joanna.majewska@e-at.edu.plThe Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5571-3054
Abstract
This article aims to recall Tennessee Williams’s early play Not About Nightingales (1938), which is virtually unknown in Poland. The text is discussed in the context of the writer’s biography and his sensitivity to the problems of the socially excluded. The play thematizes the majority’s cruel attitude towards minorities that do not fit into stereotypical frames (social or sexual). The author of the article locates the sources of Not About Nightingales in Williams’s biography: in his growing up in the Deep South, the most conservative region of the United States, and in his troubled relationship with his father, who regarded him as a misfit. Based on facts, the play reflects on the plight of prisoners who stand out as different, which exacerbates the violence against them. This early text helps sheds a different light on Williams’s work, potentially bringing it to the attention of socially engaged theater. Best known as an author of intimate psychological dramas, which have been often domesticated and appropriated by pop culture, Williams was also a writer of great social conscience, sensitive to cruelty in interpersonal relations, which manifests itself particularly against those who are different.
Keywords:
Tennessee Williams, "Not About Nightingales", American drama, the other, violence, jail, Deep SouthReferences
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Authors
Joanna Majewskajoanna.majewska@e-at.edu.pl
The Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5571-3054
Joanna Majewska - PhD, graduate of the Faculty of Polish Studies at the University of Warsaw and l'UFR d'Études slaves de la Faculté des Lettres de Sorbonne Université. She is an assistant professor at the Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw. She works on literature of European and Polish modernism, Polish horror literature, drama (Pierre de Marivaux, Tennessee Williams) and theater (Mikhail Chekhov).
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