Fugitive Kind

by Tennessee Williams, Allean Hale (Editor)

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.   Fugitive Kind , 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, Fugitive Kind introduces the character who will inhabit most of his later 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 The Fugitive Kind for the 1960 film based on Orpheus Descending ) 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 ( The Petrified Forest, Winterset ) and Romeo and Juliet. Fugitive Kind , 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 jobless wayfarers on the dole, young writers and artists of the WPA, even gangsters and G-men. Fugitive Kind 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 The St. Louis Star-Times , 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.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Fiction, Ebooks, Classics, Theatre

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Thomas Lanier Williams III, better known by the nickname Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright of the twentieth century who received many of the top theatrical awards for his work. He moved to New Orleans in 1939 and changed his name to "Tennessee," the state of his father's birth.

Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, after years of obscurity, at age 33 he became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. This play closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, he attempted a new style that did not appeal to audiences. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century, alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

Much of Williams' most acclaimed work has been adapted for the cinema. He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before his death, Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

From Wikipedia

Reviews

[Ronnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Nobody ever gets to know no body! We're all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!"

If the "N" word and epithets such as "Wop" and "Dago" bug you, even in a setting such as this 1950s-era play, then you won't make it out of the Prologue without being offended, but it also contains graceful language, notably in the bracketed stage directions calling for women's voices to rise "like hissing geese" or calling for another character to deliver her lines in "a voice that purrs with the faintly contemptuous cheer and sweetness of those hired to care for the dying." My favorite character is wild child Carol Cutrere, and my favorite of her lines are in Act One, Scene One, when she's trying to convince Val to drive her out to the local cemetery:

Take me out to Cypress Hill in my car. And we'll hear the dead people talk. They do talk there. They chatter together like birds on Cypress Hill, but all they say is one word and that one word is "live," they say "Live, live, live, live, live!" It's all they've learned, it's the only advice they can give. --Just live.... Simple!--a very simple instruction...."

Does the whole play seem melodramatic and culturally dated? Yes, but reading this script still made me want to see it on stage, or even the movie.

First line:
SCENE: The set represents in nonrealistic fashion a general drygoods store and part of a connecting "confectionary" in a small Southern town.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

pleasant 4 hour read

[Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really liked this one. Dark, gritty and takes place in St. Louis! Great dialogue. I wouldn't have guessed that this was one of Tennessee's earliest plays. Before he was called Tennessee in fact.

[Lillian · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of Williams' earliest full-length plays, it is easy to see how he got his inspiration from the movies at the time period.