Time to Adjust

Perhaps “Period of Adjustment” is called Tennessee Williams’ only comedy because it has a happy ending, something his classics can rarely claim.

But other classically Williams elements such as poetic, almost lyrical, dialogue and depth of character inhabit “Period of Adjustment” in full force.

“It’s a comedy in that everything works out in the end,” says Sean Patrick Reilly, who directs a new production of the play for TheatreSquared.

The production debuted last night at Nadine Baum Studios in Fayetteville and continues on weekends through the end of the year.

The play left the market shortly after its Broadway debut in 1960. It was later made into a movie, but remained absent from stages. Reilly, an Oxford-educated, New York-based veteran of stage, television and film, goes so far as to call the play a lost classic.

As for its unceremonious exit from the public consciousness, Reilly speculates the play got lost among two other classics written about the same time by Williams - “Orpheus Descending” and “The Night of the Iguana” - and because it’s different in tone than the bulk of his other works.

But Martin Miller, TheatreSquared managing director, saw a production of the play in London several years ago. It left an impression on him, and he suggested TheatreSquared attempt a version. That came to fruition courtesy of an adaptation by Reilly and Bob Ford, TheatreSquared artistic director and playwright in residence. “Period ofAdjustment” is generally viewed as the one Tennessee Williams play that can be adapted, Ford says.

The original versions of “Period of Adjustment” - there are three, Ford says- contain as many as nine characters. TheatreSquared’s version includes just four: George, his new wife Isabel, Ralph and Ralph’s wife of many years, Dorothea.

Like “A Christmas Carol” and“It’s A Wonderful Life” before it, “Period of Adjustment” shines because it deals with the isolation the holidays can sometimes bring.

“All good Christmas stories are stories about loneliness,”Reilly reasons.

In “Period of Adjustment,” that loneliness unfolds as George (played by Bryce Kemph) drops off his new bride, Isabel (played by Madeleine James) at the home of his Army buddy Ralph (played by David Mason). As fate would have it, Ralph’s wife, Dorothea (played by Elizabeth France) has just left as well.

The play creates four simultaneous relationships: the couples, that of the war buddies and the one forged by the two wives.

Sprinkled into the mix is a dash of Cold War-era angst and optimism, which run simultaneously. Reilly says he asked his mother, who graduated from college just a years prior to the year in which the play is set, what life was like in 1960. Relationships haven’t changed a lot since that time, she told him.

But the public’s regard for “Period of Adjustment” may be changing. New productions have sprung up in several locations, notably in San Francisco, where the San Francisco Chronicle called the show “a holiday gift.”

And, unlike so many other of Williams’ works, it’s one that might allow for smiles at the conclusion.