ORPHEUS DESCENDING

Tennessee Williams. A play that was a 1959 movie.

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 his early days. Well written acurate and telling.

I didn't like it, it was dark, full of weak characters (reasonably well acted tho) and too long with two intermissions.

Las Vegas Little Theatre tries hard and with their new $6750 monthly rent they need us all....the play has some substance and if nothing else was a new story for me.

C+ 79......they have done better and will do better in the future, glad I went.