Two youngish couples struggling to find Christmas Eve contentment in Eisenhower-era suburbia may not seem like fertile ground for an outsider’s artist like Tennessee Williams. And it isn’t.
Written
both as a send-up and a genuine appreciation for the American middle class, Period
Of Adjustment is billed as “a serious comedy,” when it is really neither.
Williams has a sense of sarcasm about his characters, but his need to convey
their basic goodness dampens any edges he might have had. Maybe on stage the
right actors could inject a spark of life, but on the page it makes for a
stiff, mawkish read.
We open on Ralph Bates, in his thirties, watching television in his home. He just quit his job and his wife has just moved back in with her parents, taking with her their son. Ralph claims not to care. A war veteran, he is more animated at the prospect of seeing his fellow ex-bombardier, George Haverstick, and his new wife, Isabel.
But when George dumps Isabel at Ralph’s front door and drives off into the night, it is clear all is not well with that marriage, either:
RALPH: George is a high-strung boy. But they don’t make them any better.
ISABEL: A man’s opinion of a man! If they don’t make them any better than George Haverstick they ought to stop production! [Act I]
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| The original cast of Period Of Adjustment when it made its debut on Broadway: Left to right, James Daly as Ralph, Rosemary Murphy as Dorothea, Robert Webber as George, and Barbara Baxley as Isabel. Image from https://www.amazon.com/Tennessee-Williams-ADJUSTMENT-Broadway-Playbill/dp/B00XAIKV7G |
Two days after John F. Kennedy was elected President, Williams was enjoying his commercial and critical peak as a playwright when Period Of Adjustment opened on Broadway. It was for him a new kind of play. Critics had carped that his 1940s and 1950s work featured sordid people living at life’s extremes. One pundit really drove the knife by complaining of the author “plunging into the sewers.”
Williams argued he was only honestly representing the human condition. Then he wrote Period Of Adjustment. Maybe it was to call out the quiet desperation of ordinary people. Maybe he sensed a cultural “period of adjustment” on the horizon, which the 1960s proved to be.
Maybe he wanted a break from the standard cast of Southern crazies.
Whatever the case, the results fell short of his usual mark. The play ran six months and was soon forgotten. While Williams didn’t fall off the planet after its production, he never quite returned to his late-1950s heights, either. Just before Period Of Adjustment came Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, and Sweet Bird Of Youth. While he did return to form with The Night Of The Iguana in 1961, Williams’s other plays from the 1960s are a case of diminishing returns: The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, The Seven Descents Of Myrtle, and In The Bar Of A Tokyo Hotel.
Maybe they are unjustly forgotten. But after reading Period Of Adjustment I think he might have hit an iceberg.
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| In a 2006 London production, Jared Harris as Ralph listens as Benedict Cumberbatch as George reveals his great dream: raising a herd of Texas Longhorn cattle for television westerns: "The Texas Longhorn isn't just cattle, it's a – dignified beast." Image from https://freemanandcumberbatch.wordpress.com/benedict-cumberbacth/theatre/period-of-adjustment/ |
An early sign of trouble can be found in the stage directions.
…he is like a judge mounting his judicial bench, except he’s not pompous or bewigged about it. He is detached, considering, thinking, and over his face comes that characteristic look of a gentle gravity which is the heart of RALPH. [Act I]
As we get to know him, Ralph is windy, querulous and patronizing, more of a problem that way than he or the playwright seem able to acknowledge. Ralph is upset his son, just out of toddlerhood, prefers dolls over toy cars, calling the child a “sissy.” He is bitter that his father-in-law hasn’t died and left him with the family business. And he is mad about living in a house in constant danger of collapse, as it is built over a vast cavern.
But he’s a prince compared to war buddy George, who has already given up on his wife Isabel after one night of marriage. She is still a virgin and shy about sex, which in turn has hurt his ego. George is already fragile enough; his longstanding tremor has gotten worse. He barks at Isabel about being frigid, while Ralph urges patience and understanding. “You’re just going through a period of adjustment,” he says often.
I guess this is the comedy of the piece, Ralph’s pleading for love and understanding despite his own situation. But it is thin stuff.
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| Author Tennessee Williams makes an effort to marry his usual overlay of existential psychodrama to middle-class American life, but his tone is muted and his characters are respectfully handled to the point of being boring. It is very different territory for him. Image from https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2014/10/18/williams-biography-takes-us-deep-inside-his-plays/10071082007/ |
When I first encountered Period Of Adjustment, years ago, I have to admit enjoying it more than the other three Tennessee Williams plays in the same collection. I think it was because I was reading them back-to-back; Period Of Adjustment makes for a break from the heavier subject matter of his other plays. It isn’t funny, but it aims for a lighter tone.
Fast forward a few years; that same lighter tone is part of the problem.
I haven’t read or seen enough Williams to know this for sure, but men seemed to be problems for him. In his plays, they come off either randy young rakes of little apparent conscience, or bitter old schemers with closets stuffed with skeletons. These two middle-aged guys fall into neither camp. Rather, they occupy a desexed neutral zone.
George is incessantly overbearing, full of anger at his new bride:
ISABEL: I don’t think it’s really very unreasonable of me to want to be treated as if I LIVED! EXISTED!
GEORGE: Will you quit actin’ like a spoiled little bitch? I want to tell you something. You’re the first woman that ever put me down! Sleepin’ las’ night in a chair? What kind of basis is that for a happy marriage? [Act II]
Ralph is mellower by contrast, not so much a bellower like George, just quick at offering wisdom, however dubious he is as its source. He sees George’s faults, and counsels patience, but he’s in no place to talk:
RALPH: Love is a very difficult – occupation. You got to work at it, man. It ain’t a thing every Tom, Dick and Harry has got a true aptitude for. [Act III]
Women are more interesting characters in Tennessee Williams plays, except again this isn’t a typical Williams play. Isabel’s frustrations at her husband create some sympathy but not engagement. She whines a lot for comic effect, demanding a cab or a call to her father. She lacks depth or pathos.
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| Jane Fonda as Isabel has it out with Jim Hutton's George in the 1962 movie adaptation of Period Of Adjustment. Despite a weaker script, it outperformed the play at the box office. Fonda makes for a foxy ingenue, while Lois Nettleton as Dorothea makes the most of a thankless part. Image from https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0056341/mediaviewer/rm1369384448 |
Much more interesting is Ralph’s estranged wife, Dorothea. She genuinely loves her man and understands he has problems with her parents, because she struggles with them, too. Because Ralph is decent but flawed, you root for her. She wants respect, but wants Ralph more:
DOROTHEA: I’ve come back crawling – not even embarrassed to do so. [Act III]
The play has a broad satirical edge – take the overbaked metaphor of the Bates’s home being built on a cavern, subject to quakes – but no teeth. Satirizing square middle-class Americana might be on the agenda, but Williams’s tone is too solemn and earnest.
ISABEL (in the other room): What an awful, frightening thing it is!
GEORGE: What?
ISABEL: Two people living together, two, two – different worlds! – attempting – existence – together! [Act III]
The
play does have some engaging minor moments, but big statements like the above
fall flat. Williams is too far out of his element here.
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