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.
