The Theater: New Play on Broadway, Nov. 21, 1960

Period of Adjustment (by Tennessee Williams) has Broadway’s laureate of sex writing what for him is virtually light verse, finds Broadway’s master of violence content with poked ribs and slammed doors. With here a bit of father fixation and there a bit of impotence anxiety or a fit of the shakes, Williams at times still manages to do wonders. But he has plainly written a comedy. It takes place on Christmas Eve instead of evoking St. Bartholomew’s Day. It deals with a period of adjustment rather than with exclamation points of cannibalism and castration. It has a happy ending, with everyone going beddie-bye, husband and wife, husband and wife. Indeed, in Period of Adjustment Williams is specifically writing of how to stay married, after one night or five years.

For that is how long the George Haversticks and the Ralph Bateses have respectively been married. When George and his unhappy bride arrive at the home of his old war buddy Ralph, Ralph’s wife has just walked out on him. Ralph, if somewhat shrewder than most men, must yet in offering the newlyweds counsel, comically seek to do unto others what exists to be done for himself. It is rather uphill work, for the still uncoupled bridal couple have tempers as well as neuroses, and the two men themselves sometimes tangle en route. Then, in Act III, Ralph’s wife comes back home again, and there is a good deal of crossfire, and there are a great many parleys and commotions in adjoining rooms, till the two men team up to breed cattle and the two women join up with their men.

Into all this, Williams has injected much enlivening comedy—now in terms of character (the bride can be wonderfully, Williamsly Suth’n), now in terms of situation, now of talk. Moreover—which is the play’s new wrinkle, the key to its change of key—Williams is suggesting that, far from so many people having hideous lives and fates, most people really needn’t suffer from even the milder, more widespread afflictions. He has called off the bloodhounds at last, and would simply have people try harder to cooperate and understand.

He has brought to this some well-written scenes and his usual technical dexterity. But even considering how amusing the play can be, and eloquent and skillful, and how well George Roy Hill has directed and Barbara Baxley, James Daly and Robert Webber have acted it, a good deal seems somehow unsatisfying. There is, in the end, too much sense of mere surface, of flare-ups with more theater in them than truth, of Freud pinch-hitting for flesh and blood, of amusing little leitmotivs in place of incisive motivations. There is not much organic development, and at times scenes dribble on or go flat. Again, there is even here too much sex, or needless talk about it, at times on the commercial rather than compulsive side. And there is too strained a dual happy ending, a sense of Williams propelling himself too far in the opposite direction, trading claws for Santa Claus. Moderating his pessimism could greatly bulwark his power; but virtually shedding it is quite something else.