Fugitive Kind

Synopsis

Social outcasts, misfit survivors, dangerous passions—Tennessee Williams fleshed out the characters and themes that would dominate his later work in Fugitive Kind, one of his earliest plays.

<i>Fugitive Kind</i>, one of Tennessee Williams's earliest plays, is one of his richest in dramatic material.

Written in 1937 when the playwright was still Thomas Lanier Williams, <i>Fugitive Kind</i> introduces the character who will inhabit most of his later plays: the marginal man or woman who, through no personal fault, is a misfit in society but who demonstrates an admirable will to survive.

Signature Tennessee Williams' characters, situations, and even the title (which was used as <i>The Fugitive Kind</i> for the 1960 film based on <i>Orpheus Descending</i>) have their genesis here.

At age twenty-six, Williams was still learning his craft and this, his second full-length play, shows his debt to sources as diverse as thirties gangster films (<i>The Petrified Forest, Winterset</i>) and <i>Romeo and Juliet.

Fugitive Kind</i>, with its star-crossed lovers and big city slum setting, takes place in a flophouse on the St. Louis waterfront in the shadow of Eads Bridge, where Williams spent Saturdays away from his shoe factory job and met his characters: jobless wayfarers on the dole, young writers and artists of the WPA, even gangsters and G-men.

<i>Fugitive Kind</i> was also Williams's second play to be produced by The Mummers, a St. Louis theatre group devoted to drama of social protest.

Called "vital and absorbing" by a contemporary review in <i>The St. Louis Star-Times</i>, this play reveals the young playwright's own struggle between his radical-socialist sympathies and his poetic inclinations, and signals his future reputation as our most compassionate lyric dramatist.

Themes

• American drama
• PS3545.I5365 F84 2001