By Robert Avila

photo by Derek Rodriguez

The latest of three "lost" early Williams plays – this one unearthed by actress Vanessa Redgrave and first staged in 1999 – Not about Nightingales is also the most impressive. Written in 1938, when Williams was still in his lanky late 20s, it's a full-blown social protest play in a decidedly '30s vein, but with a strong original voice behind it. Gangling and cumbersome at points, it's also guided by an intense energy, revealing the young playwright at a crucial stage in his development. Within the play's skillfully rendered agitprop framework (partly inspired by the cinematic style of the Federal Theater Project's Living Newspaper), we glimpse characters, emotional complexity, and elevated language developed later on.

The story comes from press accounts of a major torture scandal at a Philadelphia County penitentiary, where inmates on a hunger strike were locked in a steam-heated room (an intentional torture chamber known as "Klondike") and cooked alive. In the ensuing cover-up, blame fell on two guards, on what sounds like the still-popular "bad apples" principal, despite the investigator's belief that higher-ups were the real instigators.

On this harrowing premise, Williams puts forward a protest play that may ultimately be less politically subversive in its didactic aspects than in its poetry. At the helm of Theatre Rhino's spirited production, artistic director John Fisher (who also excels in the part of the power-mad prison warden) coaxes particularly strong performances from a set of principal characters, whose overriding condition is desperation of one kind or another: Jim (Pete Caslavka), a rebel turned model inmate, banks his freedom on an ignoble job as informer to the sleazy and sadistic warden; Butch (a full-throated, full-throttle David Bicha), the prison's resident alpha male, backs himself and his fellows into a battle of wills with the warden, leading a doomed hunger strike against prison food; the warden's attractive new secretary (Cheree A. Sager) realizes what she'll do to keep her job in the middle of the Depression; and so on. Multiple lines of relation crisscross between the principal characters, as power and frustration alternate along unpredictable currents of sex and violence.

Fisher shrewdly forgoes Rhino's main stage for the much smaller basement theater, where the play is set in the round, opening up the space considerably and at the same time taking full advantage of the grim institutional flavor of its low-hanging plumbing, dark corners, and half-obscured passageways. Erik Flatmo's minimalist set design uses a few key properties to suggest, alternately, the warden's office or a prison cell.

Meanwhile, Dave Robertson's lighting design carves out individual mental landscapes from the cramped confinement of the prison, and David Mahr's sound design creates the melancholy suggestion of life beyond the walls of the water-bound prison, including the mocking gaiety of a local pleasure cruiser, the Lorelei.

Not about Nightingales comes with limitations and excesses, but it also leaves Williams's youthful genius on display. It may stand as his most macabre work for the stage (which may partly explain why the Group Theater rejected it, leading to its 60-year shelving). Not that a penchant for the macabre was something that Williams outgrew, thank goodness (who can forget images like Suddenly Last Summer's Sebastian being devoured by a pack of little Mexican ragamuffins?); it's just that after 1938 the macabre tended to take place offstage. At the same time, Williams can't help blending even as specific a theatrical form as agitprop with his own already unmistakable concerns and gifts. In passages where the language and emotion lift his characters momentarily out of the brutal circumstances of their lives, agitprop gives way to something more subversive, namely Williams's burgeoning poetry, with its need to sanctify in art the irreducibly human component in every life.

'Not about Nightingales' runs through March 13. Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 and 7 p.m., Theatre Rhinoceros, 2926 16th St., S.F. Call for price. (415) 861-5079, www.therhino.org.