Fugitive Kind [Paperback]

Tennessee Williams (Author), Allean Hale (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2001

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 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 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 characters: 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

One of Tennessee Williams's earliest plays, Fugitive Kind, was first produced in 1937 and introduced characters and themes that 'resurfaced in Orpheus Descending and other plays. Set in a Midwestern riverfront flophouse, it centers around the proprietress, Glory, and Terry Meighan, a gangster on the lam after a bank robbery. Tensions mount between the two, and they fall for one another, but all ends in tragedy. Mainly die-hard Williams fans will want this one and they're probably better of with it than with the lackluster film version, directed by Sidney Lumet.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Williams is a playwright to watch. -- The St. Louis Star-Times, December 1, 1937, on Fugitive Kind

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation (June 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811214729
• ISBN-13: 978-0811214728
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,447,048 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), one of the 20th century's most superb writers, was also one of its most successful and prolific. His classic works include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, Camino Real, Sweet Bird of Youth, Night of the Iguana, Orpheus Descending, and The Rose Tattoo.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars The Neon Wilderness -1930s Style, October 8, 2010

By 

Alfred Johnson (boston, ma) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Fugitive Kind (Paperback)

"Hey, the message of the social gospel (Marx or Christ, or some such figure) is fine, but I want get mine now not in the great by-and-by." That message, or my paraphrase of that message, may seem old hat, but in one form or another it has animated the characters that people most of Tennessee Williams' plays, including this early effort when he was just starting out in the old St. Louis days of the 1930s long before A Streetcar Named Desire insured his literary immortality. Here Williams uses the time-tested devise of the flop house (also used in Maxim Gorky's Lower Depths, Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, and in other places like in Norman Mailer's Barbary Shore) that permits him to, with some emotional and psychic economy, look at the human condition without having to stir up too much trouble out in the mean streets of Depression-era America (1930s version, sorry).

Of course when one thinks of flop houses, or rather when I think of flop houses I think of "losers" of one sort or another. The marginal people whose very existence is a monument to the paraphrase above, including one of the key characters here hiding away in that anonymous space, Terry. Outlaws, grifters, drifters, midnight shifters, drunks, homosexuals when that was a closeted thing, leftist political exiles (self-imposed or not), and generally those who must live by their wits as best they can are the stuff of Williams fare. After reading the introduction to this play apparently this gnawing search motivated him from early on in his writing career. And this is great stuff on the theater stage, although out in those means streets such characters are as likely to knock you down for your ready cash as be "colorful". Marx (and others) called them the lumpen element that parasitically fed off and broke down the solidarity of the working stiffs. The Paris Commune, in its short existence, declared "death to thieves" from much the same motivation. Tennessee Williams says let's get the stethoscope out and see what makes them tick. And on the stage he is right. Read this one, read (or see) every Williams play you can.

4.0 out of 5 stars Down and out in St. Louis, an early Tennessee Williams work, June 2, 2010

By 

A Reader (San Francisco, California, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fugitive Kind (Paperback)

If you enjoy Tennessee Williams and are interested in his development as a playwright, you should have a look at this early play from 1937. It features homeless drifters and vagrants, an immigrant flophouse owner, his intellectual and rebel son (who resembles TW), his adopted daughter, and a bank robber on the run. Some of the influences are obvious: the Depression era atmosphere, the politically left leanings of artists and writers at the time, and gangster movies. At times the plot is contrived or predictable. Weaknesses of construction aside, what is striking is how good the writing is, with lively dialogue and characterizations (the secondary characters, such as a guitar-strumming wanderer named Texas, are in some ways more successful than the leads). Very few 26-year-olds can write this well. Of course, this 26-year-old became Tennessee Williams, and many of the ideas and situations here reappear more fully developed in later works. This early play already shows Williams' concern with individual freedom vs. various kinds of constraint and his interest in outsiders and marginalized people. One episode, when society ladies appear in the St. Louis flophouse to dispense "charity" to the less fortunate and end up creating a noisy fiasco, reappears, somewhat altered, in one of Williams' last plays, "This Is the Peaceable Kingdom."

Elsewhere on this page there is an erroneous blurb from Publishers Weekly. The 1959 film "The Fugitive Kind" directed by Sidney Lumet, with Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani, is not based on this play, but on "Orpheus Descending."

It is good to see that a critical reassessment is taking place regarding Williams' early, late and/or unpublished works, and works that were not successful during his lifetime, and to see plays like this one getting published. Hopefully New Directions will continue this effort and facilitate the rediscovery of Tennessee Williams.

3.0 out of 5 stars The Fugitive Kind, December 9, 2009

By 

Chinadoll - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Fugitive Kind (Paperback)

Honestly the only reason I purchased/read this play is because I had to for a college class that I was taking. All in all the play was alright; I never would have chosen to read this on my own. This play wasn't bad; I did like it better than some of Tennessee Williams' other plays. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless you really enjoy the works of Tennessee Williams.