STAGE.

OLDIES BUT...

'Nightingales' & 'Annie Get Your Gun'

It's because "nobody reads anymore," a man in the audience grumbled to his companion, moments before the start of Not about Nightingales, the long-lost play by Tennessee Williams. "Nobody-except for her."

She, in this case, was Vanessa Redgrave-actress, sometime political activist, and the party responsible for rescuing Nightingales from a half century of oblivion. The twenty-seven-year-old Williams drafted the script in 1938, but put it aside when he could not find a theater to accept it. The drama languished in archival limbo for decades-an unlikely fate for a work by one of the century's most revered dramatists, perhaps, but then, no one reads.

A few years ago, after coming across a reference to the title in an obscure preface the playwright had written in the 1950s, Redgrave talked the estate's executor into digging up the manuscript. Last year Nightingales was finally staged for the first time in London; the production, directed by Trevor Nunn and starring Redgrave's brother Corin, has since traveled to Houston's Alley Theatre and to Broadway.

This media-friendly back-story suits the production, since Nightingales is about discovery and disclosure. Williams based the play on a real incident in which convicts who had gone on a hunger strike at a Philadelphia prison were locked in a cell with industrial-strength radiators and roasted to death. As the gruesome details came to light in late 1938, sparking a campaign for prison reform, Williams tooled the scandal into a riveting-if slightly clumsy-meditation on power, trust, and personal freedom.

"I like blowing things open," snaps the play's most fascinating character, Canary Jim (Finbar Lynch), a stoic but tightly wound convict who has kept his sanity by collaborating with authorities. For Jim, an explosion is a kind of revelation; a crisis in the jail will expose its carefully hidden, bureaucratized cruelty (a false health history is carefully filed on index cards whenever a convict dies) and destroy the loathsome, dissolute warden (Redgrave), who can coo at a toddler at one moment and dish out tortures the next. While waiting for the inevitable cataclysm, Jim torpedoes the illusions of the warden's naive new secretary (Sherri Parker Lee), who thinks the prison humane and modern. And, in a scene that strains a little too hard for meaning, Jim takes aim at romantic idealism in general, ripping Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" out of a poetry book in disgust, with the remark that, were he to take up writing, his texts would be "not about nightingales."

Such lines bolster the bleakness of the play's vision, as does Richard Hoover's brilliantly realized set-an expanse of grid and platform that connects two- tiered barred cells, in the rear, to an all-gray office (even the U.S. flag is gray-on-gray) that juts out into the audience. (Hoover also designed jails for the films Last Dance and Dead Man Walking.) On the one hand, the unrelieved pessimism rachets up the suspense to near-thriller levels. From its earliest scenes, Nightingales seems to be holding in reserve a destructive energy that grows more threatening with each expertly acted moment-the leering Redgrave toying with a length of rubber hosepipe (the warden's favorite weapon), or the fiercely intense Lynch, who reveals Jim's frayed nerves with a single shaking hand or foot.

On the other hand, director Nunn clearly intends to keep the audience from experiencing the production as pure entertainment. The staging brings viewers uncomfortably close to the action, positioning them on three sides of the thrust stage, so that they look at each other, as well as at the performers. Actors make entrances and exits through the rows of seats, too, so that it is impossible to feel distanced from the shambling warden, or the prisoners marching in lock step. The message is obvious-we are all implicated in the brutalities we are witnessing.

This deliberately inspired collective guilt yields a slight thrill of self- congratulation, too-our willingness to be implicated in a prison tragedy, during a night at the theater, feels like evidence of a finely honed social conscience. In fact, it is hard to see Nightingales without feeling just a little bit smug. The facts surrounding the play's rediscovery and popular success seem to testify to our sophisticated cultural palate. We may not read as much as we should, these days, but at least we know how to appreciate a great playwright.

hen rummaging around in the past, it seems, we take the opportunity to confirm what we like about ourselves. The current revival of Annie Get Your Gun, for example, has allowed us to measure our progress on the sensitivity front. Though blessed with a knockout score ("There's No Business like Show Business" is only one of the delightful numbers), the original Irving Berlin classic, based on the story of sharpshooter Annie Oakley, was ill-suited to modern audiences because it disparaged Native Americans. In order to make the show more palatable, therefore, the creators of the current version sensibly recruited writer Peter Stone (Titanic, 1776) to overhaul Herbert and Dorothy Fields's 1946 book.

Some of the new material makes stereotypes turn witty somersaults. "How..." intones Chief Sitting Bull (Gregory Zaragoza) on his first entrance, only to have a group of vaudeville impresarios obligingly chirp "How!" right back. "...Are you?" finishes the deadpan chief, who becomes Annie's mentor and best friend. Elsewhere the bid for political correctness is more direct-a subplot about a star-crossed interracial romance, for example, feels a little over- deliberate.

A certain self-consciousness, in short, keeps the new Annie from being as effervescent as it might be, considering that it stars crowd-pleaser Bernadette Peters as the spunky, pistol-packing heroine. While editing out the racial slurs, Stone gave the musical a new framing narrative-Annie's rocky love affair with rival marksman Frank Butler (Tom Wopat) is now a play-within-a-play, unveiled as part of "Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show." Director Graciela Daniele exploits this conceit by having characters man spotlights and curtain ropes while the Wild West Show's circular set spins around on the stage like a lazy Susan.

The metatheatrical layering seems to invigorate the choreography (by Daniele and Jeff Calhoun), which revels in whimsical, referential movements-cowboy-style horseriding stances, flourishes with imaginary guns, and so on. But in general, the emphatic appeal to modern awareness gets in the way of the show's exuberance, even when Peters is hamming it up, swinging upside down from a trapeze, or miming a kazoo with her hands. A little tinkering has made Annie Get Your Gun into a flattering mirror, reminding us of our refined theatrical tastes and enlightened sensibility. But a mirror is not a soothing thing to watch. n