Word: warden
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...build a relationship with his condemned clients, he would play chess with them by postcard, with as many as nine miniature boards of partly played games cluttering his cramped office at any given time. And Kendall once had to be restrained from throwing a punch at a burly warden who refused to allow his doomed client John Spenkelink to see a clergyman...
...attend. Incarceration will do that to you. But the celebs who saw the film, shot entirely in America's largest prison (situated on a former slave plantation in Louisiana), gushed with praise. "Where can I get a subscription to the Angolite?" asked Anne Heche about the prison's magazine. Warden BURL CAIN, left, gave the film crew unprecedented access to all areas of his Big House, and the film's director, Jonathan Stack, found so much material there that he's now working on a film focusing on one of the inmates. He's also got a whole new crew...
...characters occupy the play's more complex moral center: the warden's new secretary (Sherri Parker Lee), who can't reveal the brutality she sees for fear of losing a job she desperately needs, and a convict called Canary Jim (Finbar Lynch), who has ingratiated himself with the warden by ratting on other inmates. Jim is the most recognizable Williams character, a stunted romantic who scoffs at Keats (when he starts writing, Jim vows, it won't be about nightingales) yet proves himself an idealist in a pinch...
...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); a sympathetically rendered...
Nunn has done a masterly job of taming this unruly work. The audience sits, theater-in-the-round style, on opposing sides of a long stage. At one end is a two-level block of cells; at the other, the warden's office, where every prop--desk, telephone, picture frames, even the American flag--is a grim steel gray. He doesn't soften the melodramatic excesses, yet he emphasizes the metaphorical overtones. There are references to Mussolini and Hitler ("that monkey with the trick mustache"); a Jewish convict laments, "I come of a people that are used to suffer...