New School Showcase: Not About Nightingales
Written by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Zishan Ugurlu
Not About Nightingales is Tennessee Williams’ brutal and upsetting prison drama investigates the inhumane prison conditions of the past and present. The play was originally written in the 1930s but wasn’t discovered until the late 1990s. The United States has the largest prison population in the world. Today 2,220,300 adults are incarcerated in US federal and state prisons, and county jails. This is about 0.91% of adults (1 in 110) in the US resident population. Additionally, 4,751,400 adults (1 in 51) are probation or on parole. Today a total of 6,899,000 adults are under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison.) The play is a meditation on violence and horror in the growing “Prison Industry”.