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THE THEATRE talist universe, there is no color, no softness, no sense of rest or promise. The iron grates on which the pris- oners march are transformed efficient- ly into trapdoors to conjure up the subterranean “Klondike”—a “little sub- urb of hell” where the inmates are FUGITIVE MIND roasted at the whim of the brutish warden (the red-faced and snarling Returning to the origins of , and “Death of a Salesman.” Corin Redgrave); the gratings also BY JOHN LAHR make the shape of a crucifix on the stage floor, hinting at the damnation that hangs in the air as grimly as the “ OT ABOUT NIGHTINGALES,” the final draft of “Not About Nightin- memory of love. an unproduced 1938 play gales,” along with several other sub- “Not About Nightingales” is a jejune N about a prison hunger strike missions, to the Group Theatre’s play- but fascinating piece. The absence of which Trevor Nunn successfully resus- writing contest (he was subsequently Williams’s distinctive cadences and of citated last year at the Royal National awarded a hundred dollars for a trio of his usual psychological complexity Theatre, in London, and which he has one-act plays), and then he hightailed it marks it as the work of a tenderfoot. reorchestrated for a transatlantic visit for New Orleans, where he discovered Based on a well-publicized incident in a at the Circle in the Square, is the first both his sexuality and his dramatic voice. Pennsylvania prison, the play is written work that Thomas Lanier Williams signed “Tennessee.” In taking the new name, Williams, who was twenty-seven and had finally graduated, with a B.A., from the University of Iowa’s writing program, aligned himself with the path- finding ancestors of his bullying and absent father, C. C. Williams, who was a shoe salesman. There were pioneers— and an early Tennessee governor—in the family’s background, but his father had given up unknown routes for trade routes; Williams, styling himself as a kind of theatrical pioneer, decided to reclaim his heritage. “Out of the sheer surfeit of being beaten down, I gath- ered out of my father’s fierce blood the power to rise somehow,” he wrote to his friend Donald Windham. “And how could the rise be gentle?” At the end of “Not About Nightingales,” Williams’s leap of faith is prefigured by the literal Damnation and blighted love: Corin Redgrave as the brutish prison warden in leap of the play’s desperate hero, a stool the American première of Williams’s early play “Not About Nightingales.” pigeon known to his fellow-inmates as Canary Jim (Finbar Lynch). “Now is In the production, Williams’s sense from the outside in, whereas Williams’s the time for unexpected things, for mir- of spiritual imprisonment finds a mature work is built from the inside acles, for wild adventures like the story- haunting correlative in Richard Hoover’s out. His storytelling skill is apparent as books!” Jim says, just seconds before he coruscating set (well lit by Chris Parry), he spins a yarn about the strike and a dives from the warden’s window into which submerges the audience in a blighted love affair between Jim and the water that surrounds the island gray, caged world. One end of the stage the secretary Eva Crane (Sherri Parker fortress, and to what he hopes is his is bounded by the sliding doors and Lee), who works with him in the war- liberation. He continues, “Almost a steel bars of two-tiered prison cells; at den’s office; but he can’t yet penetrate chance! I’ve heard of people winning on the other end is the warden’s office, the characters, who remain largely stick a long shot.” from whose window an excursion figures. In one ungainly but revealing And Williams did. Like Canary Jim, steamer (called, inevitably, the Lorelei) passage, Eva quotes an entire Keats he was planning a great escape: he was offers the tempting sight and sound sonnet (“When I have fears that I may about to spring himself from the incar- of freedom. The environment imposes cease to be”), which spells out both ceration of his unhappy St. Louis fam- on both the inmates and the audience Williams’s romantic philosophy and his ily life. In December, 1938, he mailed a sense of trapped energy. In this bru- autobiographical special pleading. “He MARCELLUS HALL

TNY—3/8/99—PAGE 92 —LIVE OPI M3403 4C,133LS 93 was like you, he had a lot of things he production, adding a compelling piece wanted to say but no chance to say to the puzzle of his emergence as the them,” Eva tells Jim about Keats. “He century’s great theatrical genius. got out of his prison by looking at the stars. He wrote about beauty as a form HE fiftieth-anniversary production of escape.” T of Arthur Miller’s masterpiece The choreographic panache of “Death of a Salesman” (at the Eugene Nunn’s production invests Williams’s O’Neill) has to contend with an ugly re- script with a poetic stylishness that his volving set, designed by Mark Wend- prose lacks. The clanging bars, the land, which robs it of a sense of place echoing curses, the cadences of the pris- and hobbles its pace. While Willy oners’ chants as guards march them off Loman is breaking down before our to supper conjure a suffocating deadli- eyes, the images that drive him crazy ness that makes Jim’s yearning for lib- don’t so much press in on his disinte- erty as palpable as Tennessee’s. Williams grating mind as swing past it like dreamed of being “the first original dumplings on a lazy Susan. This throws Homo Emancipatus—meaning (COM- Loman’s character and the play slightly PLETELY FREE MAN!)”; he even sub- off kilter, but “Death of a Salesman” titled “Stairs to the Roof,” another un- still packs a wallop. Robert Falls’s pro- produced early work, “A Prayer for duction, imported from the Goodman the Wild of Heart That Are Kept in Theatre, in Chicago, is muscular with- Cages.” Until “” out always being nuanced. The massive made him famous, and even afterward, Brian Dennehy is almost too strong Williams saw himself as on the run— and too solid in himself for the panic- first from the philistines and then from stricken salesman, yet he still makes himself. “I won’t ever make a good cap- Loman’s misguided love for his son Biff tive,” he wrote in his diary in the early and his crazy competitiveness hurt like a forties. “I guess what I will do is drive punch to the heart. The casting here is beyond safety—till I smash—Cleanly generally uneven. It’s impossible to see and completely the only hope.” Ted Koch’s Happy as the louche wom- Although “Not About Nightingales” anizer the script calls for, and Kevin seems on the surface to be more protest Anderson’s Biff has not a whiff of the than prayer, the unrelenting intensity of derelict about him. Howard Witt is Nunn’s approach takes it quickly beyond droll and shrewd as Charley, the en- the political to the allegorical. “Ev’ry vied next-door neighbor, but Elizabeth man living is walking around in a cage,” Franz turns in the evening’s most fully Jim says, preaching the gospel of the realized performance, as Willy’s belea- imagination, which Williams embraced guered wife, Linda. When she rounds early and never lost. Even at the end on her sons, accusing them of not being of his career, when his art and his life there for Willy, her fragility and resig- were a shambles, he was invoking the nation are transformed, with startling themes and images first raised in the reality, into a fierce resolve. “His name play. “Occasionally in my work I have was never in the paper,” she tells the offered a slight hint of the difficulties boys. “He’s not the finest character that involved in the accident of survival,” ever lived. But he’s a human being, Williams wrote to his former agent and a terrible thing is happening to Audrey Wood on August 14, 1973. him. So attention must be paid.” Franz, “Sometimes a moment of grace, a who is as thin as Dennehy is large, word, a gesture, a letter raps out a grounds the play and gives it a strong, code message on the walls of prisons.” almost stoic emotional center. With Williams believed in the imagina- its punishing battle between parent tion’s power to transcend barbarity; his and child, the script seems to acquire tragedy was that he was betrayed by his different meanings as audiences and imagination into a barbarousness of his their dreams grow old with it. Miller’s own making (drugs, drink, loss of com- reading of the nation’s collective un- munity). The Royal National Theatre, conscious is so accurate that the flaws which has done more than any other in this somewhat overpraised produc- organization on either side of the At- tion hardly matter. “Death of a Sales- lantic to revive Williams’s reputation, man” is a defining part of the century’s has given this small play a wonderful story; its revival is not to be missed. ♦

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