Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...when he was still struggling to find his voice as a playwright, Tom Williams, 27, read a newspaper account of four inmates at a Pennsylvania prison who died after being left to roast inside a superheated chamber dubbed "Klondike." The story spurred him to expand a one-act play he had written about prison life to a full-length drama he titled Not About Nightingales. Williams entered the play in a contest for young dramatists held by the famed Group Theatre. (Since he was two years over the age limit, he lied about his birth date and signed with...
...half-century later, Vanessa Redgrave came to the rescue. While researching her role in Williams' Orpheus Descending a few years ago, the actress discovered a reference the playwright made to his forgotten early work: "I have never written anything since then that could compete with it in violence and horror." She tracked down the manuscript at the University of Texas and eventually showed it to Trevor Nunn, the acclaimed British director (Nicholas Nickleby; Cats) who is now artistic director of London's Royal National Theatre. Nunn's first reaction was surprise that there was no role in it for Redgrave...
...young playwright shows the unlikely influence of such left-wing dramatists of the era as Clifford Odets. But he must have sat through quite a few Warner Bros. prison films of the '30s as well. Not About Nightingales is paced like a movie, with short scenes that skip willy-nilly from warden's office to cell block, from mess hall to prison yard. The warden (played with fine, greasy intensity by Corin Redgrave, Vanessa's brother) is a sadistic dictator with no redeeming features. The convicts include a bullet-headed tough guy who organizes a hunger strike (James Black...
...wrested power in a 1993 coup and maintained his grip on Africa's most populous and oil-rich nation by canceling free elections and silencing critics through imprisonment or execution; from an apparent heart attack; in Abuja, Nigeria. Perhaps Abacha's most notorious act as President was hanging the playwright and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight associates accused of treason...
...charge of the discussion about her years working and living with William Shawn, the New Yorker's editor from 1952 until 1987. Shawn died in 1992 at the age of 85, leaving sons Allen, a composer married to former New Yorker writer Jamaica Kincaid, and Wallace, an actor and playwright. Shawn's wife of 64 years, Cecille...