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Tennessee Williams' Fugitive Kind

1972; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 15; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3138/md.15.1.26

1712-5286

Donald P. Costello,

Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research

Orpheus Descending, A PLAY PRODUCED PRECISELY IN THE MIDDLE OF the career of Tennessee Williams-seven published full length plays before it and seven after it-provides us with a vocabulary for an interpretation of his whole body of dramatic work. Although all Williams' plays sound like Tennessee Williams, the inadequately regarded Orpheus Descending, a 1957 Broadway failure which lasted only 68 performances at the Martin Beck, sounds like all of Tennessee Williams. That is probably its trouble. It is the most obvious statement of his major theme, and it is jam-packed with his favorite devices. It concentrates-in obvious imagery and precise language the thematic and formal concerns which have become almost obsessive with him over the period of his life's work. This play is unmistakably Tennessee Williams: Four sensitive human beings in a Southern town are lonely fugitives trying to escape earthly corruption. The basis of the corruption is that the earthly representatives treat human beings as objects. The dramatic technique used to communicate this corruption is a vivid theatricality of violence and horror, overlaid with a mystical non-realism made heavy with symbolism. Light-dark imagery helps to separate the unearthly fugitives from the earthly corrupted. The fugitives' attempts to escape corruption are marked by the retaining of a childlike, free, or wild nature, by attempts to recapture a lost past of innocence, by sacramental purification of fire and water, by attempts to escape into artistic visions or sex, by attempts to counter barren death with fruitfulness, and by seeking as a symbol of hope some pure natural object which has risen above earthly taint.