Period of Adjustment
by Tennessee Williams
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Period of adjustment, : a view of two marriages at points of acute crisis : one couple has just broken up after five years together ; the other has not been able to come to terms in one day of wedlock. Both couples are living through a period of adjustment. The phrase is tinged with irony. The play examines the sources of the crisis. Ralph Bates, a former war hero, has in-law trouble. George Haverstick, a war buddy who unexpectedly visits him on Christmas Eve with his bride of a day, has show more the shakes; his difficulty seems to be a fear of impotence. Yet the end is happy, as comedy requires. show lessTags
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332+ Works 31,969 Members
After O'Neill, Williams is perhaps the best dramatist the United States has yet produced. Born in his grandfather's rectory in Columbus, Mississippi, Williams and his family later moved to St. Louis. There Williams endured many bad years caused by the abuse of his father and his own anguish over his introverted sister, who was later permanently show more institutionalized. Williams attended the University of Missouri, and, after time out to clerk for a shoe company and for his own mental breakdown, also attended Washington University of St. Louis and the University of Iowa, from which he graduated in 1938. Williams began to write plays in 1935. During 1943 he spent six months as a contract screenwriter for MGM but produced only one script, The Gentleman Caller. When MGM rejected it, Williams turned it into his first major success, The Glass Menagerie (1945). In this intensely autobiographical play, Williams dramatizes the story of Amanda, who dreams of restoring her lost past by finding a gentleman caller for her crippled daughter, and of Amanda's son Tom, who longs to escape from the responsibility of supporting his mother and sister. After The Glass Menagerie,Williams wrote his masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire, (1947), along with a steady stream of other plays, among them such major works as Summer and Smoke(1948), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1954), and Suddenly Last Summer (1958). His plays celebrate the "fugitive kind," the sensitive outcasts whose outsider status allows them to perceive the horror of the world and who often give additional witness to that horror by becoming its victims. Stephen S. Stanton has summed up Williams's "virtues and strengths" as "a genius for portraiture, particularly of women, a sensitive ear for dialogue and the rhythms of natural speech, a comic talent often manifesting itself in "black comedy,' and a genuine theatrical flair exhibited in telling stage effects attained through lighting, costume, music, and movements." After The Night of the Iguana (1961), Williams continued to write profusely---and constantly to revise his work---but it became more difficult to get productions of his plays and, if they were produced, to win critical or popular acclaim for them. Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for these two and for The Glass Menagerie and The Night of the Iguana. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Work Relationships
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Period of Adjustment
- Original title
- Period of Adjustment: High Point Over a Cavern
- Original publication date
- 1960-11-14
- People/Characters
- Ralph Bates; George Haverstick; Isabel Crane; Dorothea McGillicuddy
- Important places
- Memphis, Tennessee, USA
- Related movies
- Period of Adjustment (1962 | IMDb)
- Dedication
- To the director and the cast
- First words
- The set is the interior and entrance of a "cute" little Spanish-type suburban bungalow.
- Disambiguation notice
- This work refers to separate editions of Period of Adjustment. Please do not combine with omnibus editions that also contain other plays.
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 78
- Popularity
- 404,935
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.50)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 3
- ASINs
- 9
