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Wednesday, April 9, 2008
By Liam Rinehart
A & E Reporter
By the late 1950s, Tennessee Williams had become famous for his dark and emotional plays like “The Glass Menagerie” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” But in 1958, in between work on “Suddenly Last Summer,” “Sweet Bird of Youth” and “The Night of the Iguana,” Williams began to pen “Period of Adjustment.”
“Period of Adjustment” was an uncharacteristic departure for Williams. It is a dark comedy, whereas the rest of his work is riddled with darkness, depravity, insanity, incest, and extreme violence. Soon after the play opened in 1960, the playwright’s brother Dakin commented on it, saying, “Not a single person was raped, castrated, lynched, committed, or even eaten.”
The play is set on Christmas Eve in 1960 in a new suburb of Memphis and tells the story of two couples, the Bates and the Haversticks. Ralph Bates, played by Ben Beams, and George Haverstick, played by Joey Cruse, share a connection from a couple years back, as they are both veterans from the Korean War. But the links don’t stop there. Both are men having problems with their marriages, both just quit their jobs, and both are suffering an emotional crisis.
“Period of Adjustment” explores a side not normally seen from Williams. The play takes an honest look at marriage, intimacy, and sexual insecurity. Yet, the most constant feature of Williams’ writing, poetic symbolism, is lacking in the ferocity that it had in earlier works.
Near the beginning, Ralph reveals to Isabel Haverstick that his development is built over a cavern. Because of this, the entire suburb is gradually sinking into the ground. Obviously, the constant sinking of the house is a metaphor for both of the marriages, which are slowly losing ground.
But there is another interpretation for this cavern metaphor. Williams had spent the later part of the 1950s in the spot light and, at the end of that decade, he had come under scrutiny for the consistent portrayal of immoral and aberrant behavior.
He defended his plays saying, “The theater has made its greatest artistic advance through the unlocking and lighting up and ventilation of the closets, attics, and basements of human behaviour and experience.
No significant area of human experience should be held inaccessible, provided it is presented with honest intention and taste, to the writers of our desperate time.” It could be that “Period of Adjustment” was his stab at critics by showing them a view of life over the cavern, rather than in it.
Whatever one might think of the back-story, UIS professor Eric Thibodeaux-Thompson has done a good job directing this lesser known Williams’ play. If the first showing on Friday is any indication, then it’s a show worth seeing. There is a balance amongst the cast that is both entertaining and comical without being overbearing or trite.
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