Tennessee Williams: Fugitive Kind.

Kolin, Philip C.

Allean Hale, ed. New York. New Directions 2001. xxv + 147 pages. $13.95 ISBN 0-8112-1472-9

THE MOST EXCITING THING in Tennessee Williams scholarship over the last few years has been the (re)discovery of his "apprentice plays," not unearthed or, in some cases, produced since the late 1930s. As she has already done for two of these apprentice plays -- Not About Nightingales and Stairs to the Roof (see respectively WLT 72:4, p. 833, and 74:4, P. 816) -- Allean Hale, magisterial Williams scholar, offers an extraordinary edition of and introduction to Williams's second attempt at a long play, Fugitive Kind. (Candles to the Sun, to be published in 2002 by New Directions, was his first.) Performed in 1937 by the Mummers, a St. Louis experimental little theater, Fugitive Kind is a far different work than Glass Menagerie, Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or Night of the Iguana.

Set in a Depression-ridden St. Louis flophouse with a cast of over thirty assorted character (and ethnic) types decrying social ills, Fugitive Kind reads like a combination of gangster films, Clifford Odets-style agitprop drama, melodrama, and Elmer Rice-like expressionism. Clearly, it is indebted to all of these forms, but particularly to Maxwell Anderson's Winterset, which it follows in part. In short, as Hale points out, the play flows with "kitchen sink realism." At times Williams's dialogue is puerilely trite ("Glory, you don't belong here"), but it can also be terrifyingly poetic: "Death's like a river. It's dark and running away."

Setting in Fugitive Kind becomes an early Tennessee trademark. The St. Louis flophouse ("This town is a jinx," says a resident) is run by a dialect-speaking Jewish father (Gwendlebaum) and his adopted, symbolically named Christian daughter Glory. It is a haven for the transients the likes of whom populate O'Neill's Long Voyage Home and The Iceman Cometh, Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody, and the assorted derelicts in David Mamet's plays. Texas, the warbling troubadour with a guitar, reminds Hale of Williams himself. Tubercular Carl, who "spits up blood all night," is callously rushed to his death by a city ambulance. The crazed Abel obsesses over setting a woman's hair on fire.

There are three main protagonists. Terry Meighan, the fugitive gangster, seeks sanctuary and talks Glory into escaping with him. In his voice -- "Fugitives from justice. Naw, we're fugitives from in-justice. We're running away from stinkin traps that people tried to catch us in" -- we can hear John Garfield, Humphrey Bogart, and James Cagney. Glory, the doomed damsel, and her brother Leo, the revolutionary expelled from college, are the other two principal figures. Carl voices a perennial Williams theme: "We didn't build walls around us, we don't belong -- No, we're the outcasts, the lunatics, criminals -- the Fugitive kind." What they flee is the law, a father's disdain (Williams's own plight), loneliness, and hollow love. But Terry never escapes; he is shot by a federal agent.

The verbal/physical imagery of Fugitive Kind accommodates the ambitious set: brooding cityscapes, arc lights, warning cathedral bells, and snow (atmospheric and hallucinogenic). Williams never lets us forget we are in the pit of the Depression -- its humor, lingo, violence, class warfare, racism, and hopelessness.

Despite its proletarian clamor, Fugitive Kind is artistically proleptic. Terry first recalls Canary Jim in Williams's prison film Nightingales (done in 1938) and the later peripatetic Jeremiahs, Val Xavier or Chance Wayne. In his views on impending war, Leo sounds like Tom Wingfield: "Bombs will explode in the streets of Shanghai, and the rebels will make another drive on the lines at Barcelona." Glory is a precursor for Williams's women who give and lose all for love: Blanche, Alma, Heavenly. The ischemic transients foreshadow the street people in Camino Real and the habitues of Monk's bar in Small Craft Warnings. The prostitute Bertha resurfaces in the same city of St. Louis in Hello from Bertha. Finally, at the end of scene 3, Glory sends Terry (whom she truly loves) away because she is frightened, and as he leaves, her dull, conformist boyfriend Herman enters. Williams's stage directions read: "Dabbing her face with powder, she rushes out to join him [Herman]. We hear a truck rumbling down the street or a clanging streetcar." Williams heard the mournful sound of a streetcar and the death of desire ten years later in 1947, when Streetcar Named Desire revolutionized the American theater -- a greater revolution than Terry, Leo, or their creator could ever have imagined in 1937.

Once more, kudos to Allean Hale for recovering a lion's share of the early Williams canon.

Philip C. Kolin
University of Southern Mississippi