Not About Nightingales

Not About Nightingales is a three act play written by Tennessee Williams in 1938. The play itself focuses on a group of inmates who go on a hunger strike in attempt to better their situation. There is also a soft 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. Williams gained inspiration for the play, after reading newspaper accounts of inmates suffocated in a steam room in a Pennsylvania prison.

Although the play was originally written in the 1930s, it wasn’t discovered until the late 1990s when Vanessa Redgrave made it her personal mission to track it down.