March 11, 2006: Williams, Period of Adjustment
Almeida Theatre. Directed by Howard Davies
A two-level set, consisting of a living-room-cum-kitchen on the main floor and a bedroom and bathroom at the top of a curving staircase — somewhere in the South. Williams may have specified where, in the deep South, the play transpires, but the Almeida program is silent on these details (as are so many programs these days). I didn’t know this play before tonight; it opened in New York in 1960 and speaks of the 1950’s and that hopeful and secretly nervous and troubled — and not so secretly conformist — age. The age in which I came to adulthood; I was twenty-one in 1956. The world was full of promise, but it was not my oyster; somebody else’s oyster, in fact, and I was envious of the people my age who looked like possessors of oysters and a knife to open them with.
This reminiscence is to the point, I’d say, because Williams is writing a comedy about adjustment to the realities of the young adult world, and it’s a hard thing, but at the same time a funny thing too. To his credit, Williams captures the shaky, still unformed identities that pass for character to a mostly preoccupied world. Interpersonal relationships, in the circumstances, are uneasy, and commitments are fairly terrifying.
The play turns on the temporary (we think) re-uniting of friends, Ralph Bates and George Haverstick, who actually don’t know each other all that well. George has just married Isabel, a nurse, who gave George alcohol rubs while he was a patient in Barnes Hospital, suffering from chronic tremors for which there was no clear neurological explanation. For his part, Ralph has married money, but the father of his wife, Dorothea, has hung on out of all expectation, leaving Ralph, Dorothea, and their three-year-old living in a not-so-nice, cramped house built over a cavern that is gradually drawing the house down upon itself, tremor by tremor. Cracks in the wall and ceiling will be ever more extended as the action unfolds.
The symbolism of tremors in the play signals that it is, for all its comedy, an authentic Tennessee Williams play about the presence of literal or metaphorical, human or natural-world vibrations that are the tell-tale signs of permanent maladjustment — Williams’s perennial subject, after all. There is plenty of genuine humor in the play, and Williams’s canny sense of good staging and dramatic effect serves him well. The “adjustment” that goes on is a double one, that is, involving two pairs of characters, with quite different problems, so far as the details of their relationships are concerned, but with a big single problem, so far as the anxieties of male sexuality are concerned. Williams doesn’t need to probe very deep to expose performance anxiety beneath the bravado that commonly attempts to cover it over. And there are scenes in which Ralph and George step out of their socially-induced roles as good ol’ boys and sparring partners for long enough to admit that t