The Tennessee Williams Annual Review

 

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Period of Adjustment in Context: Tennessee Williams and Noël Coward

R. Barton Palmer

The Anglo-American theater world was shocked in the spring of 1960 when Tennessee Williams announced in several interviews his determination to abandon “what have been called my ‘black’ plays”—the plays that had made him an internationally famous dramatist.¹ Vowing to make a new start, the playwright revealed his decision to take up what he called “serious comedy” (qtd. in Weatherby 61–62). Comedy was a genre that in his decade and a half of writing for the stage he had never before explored and in which he had expressed no interest. Period of Adjustment, then in the initial stages of production, would be his inaugural effort, as he was pleased to report. After tryouts in Miami, preceded by a publicly acrimonious controversy when Elia Kazan declined to direct despite his initial agreement to do so, Period was brought to Broadway on 10 November.² Kazan’s departure from the project proved to be a bad omen.

¶2

Theatergoers were not entranced by Williams’s sudden determination to, as he put it, “cast a kinder shadow [. . .] on the quieter aspects of existence” (qtd. in Palmer and Bray 196). Ticket sales were weak from the outset; the play closed after only 129 performances, a dismal run rescued only somewhat by a profitable Hollywood version. Period, however, was not accorded the compliment of a transfer to the London stage, which Williams must have regarded as a slight after his earlier plays had enjoyed considerable success in Britain. The production’s failure seems to have had little or nothing to do with theatrical fashion, since it came at a time when comedies were immensely popular on Broadway, especially Neil Simon’s Come Blow Your Horn and Leslie Stevens’s The Marriage-Go-Round, then in the process of enjoying long and profitable runs of 700 and 677 performances, respectively. Neither of these plays, it must be noted, was promoted as a serious comedy. Period received only scant praise from the Broadway establishment, whose members for the most part found themselves puzzled by Williams’s new initiative. Even John Simon, usually one of New York’s most astute and sophisticated critics, faulted Period, an evaluation Alexander Pettit attributes to a belief that Williams simply “ha[d] tried and failed to write conventional comedy” (107).

¶3

We should be patient with Simon. After all, it was unclear what exactly Williams meant by claiming that Period, like the comedies presumably to follow, was serious, in terms of theme, theatrical style, or both. In 1960, comedies aiming at intellectual complexity had for some time been referred to as “high.” Did Williams have something in particular in mind in using the term serious comedy instead of high comedy? Pettit takes an authorial approach to answering the question. A thorough analysis of the play’s compositional history, he argues, reveals that Williams was attempting, if somewhat confusingly, to make a thematic point in which he was deeply invested. The play, so says Pettit, was designed to “reconcile proscribed desire—extramarital and, more urgently, homosexual—to the conventions of comedy” (115). In his view, these are the same conventions against which Williams would “push more aggressively [. . .] in his later work” (98). And yet in Period Williams was “unsure about the terms of his rebellion,” which was in Pettit’s view the main reason for the play’s failure to connect with Broadway playgoers and critics (98). Pettit’s formulation seems right, though the problem to some degree, at least to judge from the reviews, was also that many could not accept Williams as a comic dramatist (see Palmer, “Period of Adjustment and Hack Writing” for details). Newsweek’s theater critic T. H. Wenning dubbed this new artistic self “unbeastly Williams,” a description not meant as a compliment.

¶4

Pettit locates Period’s seriousness in its modernist assault on the structural and ideological givens of stage comedy, and his queer reading of the play sees it as Williams’s struggle to give voice to the identity he had only obliquely acknowledged in his work but was living out in public. Pettit argues that, even though the production was inarguably a disaster, and even though Williams promotes none of his later works as a serious comedy and never admits to abandoning this change in artistic direction, the play should not be considered a failed experiment. The commercial failure and the playwright’s silent change of course, Pettit asserts, are irrelevant facts. Period, he writes, “points towards a future rich in intellectual experimentation” while looking look back to comic themes explored in earlier work (115). At the same time, Pettit is forced to admit that the works composed in the aftermath of the comedy’s inability to find and hold an audience “would not prove long on luminescence” (97).

¶5

Such a seamless view of the place of Period within the playwright’s career becomes problematic once we move beyond a narrow focus on the works themselves. Pettit’s account of the play and what constitutes its seriousness is persuasive but remains incomplete, and to some degree distorted, because the immediate contexts of the play’s production—personal, literary, and theatrical—are ignored. The break in the playwright’s career is emptied of its significance. Crucially, a neoromantic approach of this kind fails to identify the ways in which Period is conventional as well as personal. Williams was a queer artist struggling to voice through comic form the discontents of heterosexual monogamy and matrimony, connecting him to a well-established Anglo-American tradition of stage comedy. In 1960, that tradition extended from Oscar Wilde to Somerset Maugham and then to Noël Coward, who was still active when Williams was beginning his career. In fact, evidence suggests that Williams decided to put a seriocomic critique of conventional marriage at the center of Period precisely because the theme had proved commercially and artistically successful for decades. The acclaimed 1947 New York revival of the foundational work in the tradition, Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), starring John Gielgud, would have demonstrated to the young Williams the continuing popularity of this kind of slyly subversive comedy.

¶6

Another revival, however, the 1948 Broadway production of Coward’s Private Lives, is likely more relevant to the genesis of Period. Starring Tallulah Bankhead, with whom Williams was well acquainted, this production enjoyed 248 Broadway performances and then a months-long and much-ballyhooed national tour that yielded $1.5 million at the box office (Hoare 372). This revival proved to be one of the most significant theatrical events of the decade, and it helped transform Bankhead into a major theatrical star (Bret 160–73). Private Lives was entertaining Broadway theatergoers while A Streetcar Named Desire was enjoying its own spectacular run. Williams could scarcely have failed to notice Private Lives’s success, financial and critical, and the subsequent boost to Coward’s postwar popularity and reputation, which had weakened after a series of disheartening flops with new productions (Lesley 267–301). It is crucial to point out that Williams was moved to take Private Lives as a model only when he decided to turn to serious comedy, the dramatic genre of which Coward in the postwar era was the acknowledged master. This career move was uncharacteristic; his previous body of work, though showing some influence from others, is substantially sui generis. Williams had never before determined to write himself into a vibrant tradition through an inventive process of appropriation and reinvention. Circumstances at the end of the 1950s, however, encouraged him to make this decision. It is to them that we first must turn.

The Show Must Go On

¶7

“Cultural authority,” observes Joan Shelley Rubin, “while it may appear entrenched, is often precarious and always open to renegotiation on the basis of the anxieties in play at a given historical moment.” As she goes on to demonstrate, the ever-labile establishment of a text’s worth or even its nature, often measured by such hierarchical labels as popular, middlebrow, and highbrow, has “as much to do with literary politics and institutions as with standards of taste” (149). After the success of The Glass Menagerie in 1944,Williams produced a string of plays that proved to be hits with theatergoers and critics (academic as well as theatrical), who treated his works as significant contributions to American dramatic art. Streetcar won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Best Play Award in 1948 (Menagerie won in 1945), and these were only the first of the numerous accolades that he would accumulate in the next decade. That period of middlebrow and highbrow acclaim was followed in the 1960s by a bust, as audiences and reviewers alike were turned off by the less accessible plays he now chose to write.

¶8

Critics also were disappointed by this sudden embrace of a modernist theater that went against the poetic realism at the heart of his amazing run of successes in the 1950s. Annette J. Saddik demonstrates the usefulness of focusing on what Rubin identifies as the “anxieties in play” for all involved at the time when Williams, more or less abandoning poetic realism in the course of the 1960s, determined to pursue more highbrow forms of self-expression by drawing on what a biographer aptly terms a “deeper and more obscure realm” of self (Leverich xxiii).³ When Williams died in 1982, his reputation was at a low ebb. And yet in the decades following his death, as critical tastes shifted, his status with the literary establishment steadily rose, arguably to a higher level than it had attained by the end of the 1950s. Hitherto unproduced work has been brought successfully to the stage and screen, while continuing revival of his Broadway productions, including some that failed initially, has secured his position as a canonical author (see Saddik, Tennessee; Lahr, Tennessee).

¶9

Fundamental to Williams’s success in the first decade or so of his career was his ability to write plays that average theatergoers found accessible at the same time that the critical establishment assessed them to be of substantial literary value. His drama was effectively liminal, negotiating appreciation and approval as both middlebrow and highbrow fare. The failure of the archly modernist Camino Real on the Broadway stage in 1953 established for Williams the limits of that negotiation; his subsequent plays from the period moved back toward poetic realism, the foundational mode of his earlier successes.

¶10

Authorial reputation is subject to continual renegotiation, and careers are shaped inevitably by reception, institutional opportunity, and various limiting factors, especially personal ones. Literary politics of this kind are crucial to an understanding of Period. The playwright had much to consider. What to say to audiences wondering about the sudden turn to comedy? How to explain to the public the abandonment of a well-established personal brand? Perhaps most crucially, how to confect a hit property in an unfamiliar genre the first time out? Issues of reputation, genre, audience expectation, and economic pressures must all be considered in understanding Williams’s decision to renegotiate his authorship at a moment of what he believed was impending professional crisis.

¶11

To some degree that crisis was psychological. As John Lahr reports, in a confessional moment Williams admitted that his psychiatrist, Lawrence Kubie, had recently advised him to turn away from the violent hate that was a source of his creativity but also a continuing threat to his mental stability; pursuing happier subjects would supposedly be therapeutic (Tennessee 402). Williams repeated more or less the same story to Wenning, who doubted that the transformation would endure since happy subjects seemed so counter to the drive of the earlier work (96).

¶12

The key point about these supposed confessions is that Williams seemed determined to provide critics and playgoers alike with an acceptable reason for this shift, one rooted in the artistic self, with its particular discontents and needs for renewal. This intimate revelation may well be true in some sense but also seems likely to have been a smokescreen of sorts. Williams was rightly worried that transforming himself into a comic dramatist might harm his hard-earned reputation as a serious dramatist. He did not wish to be understood by the literary establishment as turning for practical reasons alone to what many thought of as hack work, and yet at the same time he attempted to explain the turn to comedy as a gesture to retain and build his audience. Writing to order, of course, was not—perhaps still is not—condoned in the true literary artist, even if Williams found an honored model for this new composition and adapted it to his own purposes. Period would be an inspired and provocative reinvention of one of the Anglo-American stage’s most acclaimed comedies, even if it lacked the shimmering comic surface and sheer outrageousness of Private Lives. But Williams’s play could not acknowledge its generic heritage.

¶13

Williams’s shift to the enduringly popular genre of comedy was not so much therapeutic as economic. He hoped to develop a new, financially successful vein of writing. The strongest proof is that he returned, without further public comment, to his natural, dark material once Period failed theatrically. In 1958, Williams had good reason to believe that the popularity of the brand he had established was waning. At forty-seven years old, he was understandably determined to make as much money as he could, and while he could: not only from stage productions but also and especially from the Hollywood screen adaptations that had always followed (with the exception of Camino Real, which lacked the presoldness—i.e., the built-in audience awaiting it—that film producers desired). Williams’s life, both personal and artistic—what Lahr’s volume title calls a “mad pilgrimage of the flesh”—required substantial financing, a fact that obsessed him throughout his career (Tennessee). In the 1950s, when ten thousand dollars a year was the equivalent of a six-figure salary in 2018, he lived like a movie star, some of whom made less money than he. Consider that in exchange for the screen rights to his Pulitzer Prize–winning A Streetcar Named Desire Williams received $350,000, which in 1950 was a medium-sized fortune (Palmer and Bray 76). Similar payouts, the most substantial coming from Hollywood, followed throughout the decade. These considerable earnings fueled Williams’s evolution into a globetrotting celebrity, a cultural role and position of eminence in which, as Lahr documents, he reveled and whose decline he feared (Tennessee).

¶14

While Period was in the midst of its Miami tryouts, Williams mused matter-of-factly that “even when I had a hit on Broadway, my annual income never exceeded $300,000. And after 1966, my accountants tell me, my income will drop to $15,000 a year. My movie sales will have been finished by then—and I’d better have something else ready by that time” (qtd. in Donahue 124). If indirectly, Williams here admits his fear that playgoer interest in his accustomed theatrical vein had been more or less exhausted; he knew well that without a successful Broadway run any future plays would not excite Hollywood interest. Williams calculated that if he did not soon generate new material that proved attractive he would be reduced, if not to penury, to at best an ordinary middle-class lifestyle. The turn to serious comedy seems to be the “something else” he thought might pay for his constant travels abroad and a social life that was dependent on connections with other glitterati and jet-setters.

¶15

The initial string of critical and commercial success was almost certainly coming to an end. Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), his most recent Broadway production, closed with the gigolo hero, who had infected the love of his life with venereal disease, awaiting castration at the hands of her vengeful father. This combination of a toxic sexuality with horrific violence was vintage Williams, but this time it had not proved especially appealing to either Broadway audiences or filmgoers, even after being melodramatized in the Hollywood fashion. Sweet Bird had closed after only 375 performances; more disappointing, perhaps, was that there was no interest in a London production—a slap in the face for a playwright who was used to international acclaim. Sweet Bird’s film version (1962, adapted and directed by Richard Brooks), despite an effective and very sexy performance by Paul Newman, one of the era’s most bankable performers, had not done nearly as well critically or commercially as Newman’s previous Williams film, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958, also Brooks), and the playwright felt the cooler reception called into question his own continuing appeal to Hollywood. The most important movie critic of the age, Bosley Crowther, writing in the New York Times, complained about the disabling structural flaws in Sweet Bird. He opined that it was a “poisonous play” that was moreover characterized by a palpable staleness in its presentation of familiar Williams themes: “this cynical, coruscating drama has a strong look of being contrived, and Mr. Brooks’ happy ending for it is implausible and absurd. [. . .] ‘Sweet Bird of Youth’ [. . .] has the taint of an engineered soap opera, wherein the soap is simply made of lye, that’s all.” Under the circumstances, taking his career in a new direction would have seemed a wise move to Williams, even had it not been prescribed, so to speak, by an alienist concerned about his patient’s depression.

¶16

After the not so wonderful experience of Sweet Bird, a careful Williams spent considerable energy preparing the ground for his new play, reconstructing himself as an unintellectual purveyor of simple dramatic thrills in which the convention of the happy ending is honored, even if in that ending the restoration of consensus values is only partial. If Period of Adjustment itself was a bold gesture at making a fresh artistic start, so was Williams’s public proclamation to the New York Times critic Arthur Gelb that his principal aim was reaching a “mass audience,” a term seemingly borrowed from the popular imitators of the Frankfurt school critique of consumer capitalism (e.g., Vance Packard and William H. Whyte, Jr.). Such language seems thoroughly out of character, but perhaps that is the point. The playwright’s intention is clear enough: I am a man of the theater, and I aim to please.

¶17

The purpose of the new direction, or so Williams reported to Gelb, was to reaffirm his commitment to reaching the popular audience, whose interest he had to some degree lost, as he obliquely admitted to the reporter. The problem as Williams saw it had everything to do with a conflict between highbrow and middlebrow values, though these are not the terms he chooses. Kazan had begged off participating in Period, so the playwright thought, because some in the establishment had been sniping “at his so-called melodramatic interpretation of my plays” and had been (according to Williams) attributing that interpretation to the director’s “looking for popular success.” Kazan had accused him of being “terrified of failure,” a comment Williams accepts as true enough, even if he gives it a different spin: “My cornpone melodrama is all my own. [. . .] It’s quite true that I want to reach a mass audience. I feel it can dig what I have to say, perhaps better than a lot of intellectuals can. I’m not an intellectual. And perhaps, at times, I’ve exceeded the dignified limits in trying to hold an audience.” Kazan, he proclaims, helped him to “reach my audience, which is my aim in life—the bigger the audience, the better” (qtd. in Gelb; emphasis mine).

¶18

Period’s artistic volte-face was perhaps exceeding “dignified limits” in seeking out a lower common denominator between the literary and the commercial. Why else assert with uncharacteristic modesty that his new work is “an unambitious play,” designed only to “tell the truth about a little occurrence in life”? Williams claims to have no intention to push this simple story beyond its “natural limits,” and for this reason Period would be “my most realistic play” (qtd. in Gelb). Prospective playgoers were thus assured that Period would be more accessible than recent Williams work. The drama is indeed devoid of those poetic and modernist stylings that had given some of his plays a distinctively European aura, turning off the “mass audience” and likely harming ticket sales. Williams was reminded of that fact while Period was in production. Released in 1960, Sidney Lumet’s film version of The Fugitive Kind, with the play’s mythological and antirealistic elements more or less fully intact, flopped with filmgoers and most critics, prompting Stanley Kauffmann, writing in The New Republic, to ask, “Is there a future for Tennessee Williams?” (qtd. in Miller).

¶19

Period would be more demotic, working for the most part (though not entirely) within the conception of comedy Broadway and Hollywood had taught the public to expect. The play, as Williams reported, has an ending that is “non-tragic,” meaning that the “people at the end still have problems, but they have found each other, and maybe they can now solve their problems together” (qtd. in Gelb). This formula would not be out of place in a screenwriting manual. It is hard to see how the choice—or, at least, the description of it—fits with the approach to dramatic art Williams expresses in the years before and after, but it makes perfect sense as an audience-building gesture (see Weales for a similar view).

¶20

The account of Period he offered Gelb, however, does not do justice to what his serious comedy actually accomplishes. The play reveals problems whose long-term resolution seems doubtful, perhaps impossible. What Williams chose to say to the reporter reveals less about the work itself and more about the “anxieties in play” as he looked forward to opening night—and also to renewing a career that seemed in trouble. As Pettit shows, and as a comparison with Private Lives confirms, Period offers a form of seriousness ripe for appreciation by the literary establishment, even if Broadway critics at the time were not disposed to notice it.

¶21

Despite Williams’s ostensible rejection of the intellectual and aim to reach the largest possible audience, his emphasis on Period’s realism in the Gelb interview suggests that this new play should not be written off as a forgettable bit of theatrical entertainment. Broadway comedies by and large were treated as amusing if ephemeral and were not expected to add anything to the development of American dramatic art. Consider Muriel Resnick’s Any Wednesday (1964). This mildly titillating sex comedy (involving two mismatched couples, similar to what Williams had offered four years earlier) enjoyed a spectacular run of 984 performances, and the inevitable Hollywood screen version (1966, directed by Robert Ellis Miller) did well at the box office. Sandy Dennis received a Tony Award for her performance in the starring role as a mistress who eventually turns the tables on her exploitative older lover; Jane Fonda, who took over the part for the film version, was nominated for a Golden Globe. There was nothing overtly serious about Resnick’s play despite its engagement of sorts with the gender issues beginning to emerge in American culture. After all, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had been published in 1963 and was a prominent feature on the New York Times bestseller list while Any Wednesday was enjoying the early months of its run.

¶22

Resnick makes very little of the triumph enjoyed by both the betrayed wife and the exploited mistress, never exploring in any depth the issue of male privilege that she engages for humorous effect. Her comedy could hardly be called serious, and the author claimed no seriousness for it. An unalloyed happy ending metes out thoroughly conventional fates to the quartet of characters going through a “period of adjustment.” The philandering husband ends up alone and somewhat impoverished after a poetically just division of family resources. His ex-wife looks forward to an independent romantic life. The former mistress, freed from bondage to her overbearing paramour, finds love with a resolutely non-alpha male of her own age. Williams denied Period such a genre-sanctioned, utopian ending, thus failing, in the eyes of some, to write conventional comedy and making it difficult for him to garner the huge audience he desired. (John Simon interprets the ending as the playwright’s saying to his audience, “Of course there is no hope for such as these, but I’ll be damned if I’ll come out and say it!” [“Theatre” 83].) In Period the newlyweds set out on their honeymoon in a hearse, Williams’s comic riff on the foundational metaphor of Streetcar. The final stop of this journey of desire is a metaphorical cemetery, as the two mismatched couples can look forward to nothing more than spending the remainder of their lives in what the play has established as the deadening state of matrimony.

Men and Women in Trouble

¶23

In the subtitle of The Importance of Being Earnest (first performed in 1895), Oscar Wilde styles his play as “a trivial comedy for serious people,” providing the perfect generic label for the plays that have followed in the same tradition: namely, that of exposing the discontents of gender as performed—especially in matrimony, which is dramatized as dissatisfying for both men and women (Sinfield). If with less wit and self-conscious detachment, Somerset Maugham’s drawing room drama-comedies, particularly The Circle (1921) and The Constant Wife (1926), similarly engage with the ambivalences and failures of heterosexual coupling, offering, especially in these two examples, a critique of women’s approach to their role that borders on misogyny (see Barnes). In this tradition, queer alternatives to the considerable discontents of monogamous matrimony are “politely disguised behind a screen of heterosexuality,” in the apt formula of Richard Dietrich (161). It would be distorting, however, to claim that these plays focus exclusively on what by implication lies behind the screen and dare not speak its name: the screen is inextricable from what it conceals.

¶24

Such screening was mandated by the cultural politics of the age, which in this regard were not much different from the American social scene of 1960 (on this key point see Savran). Alan Sinfield is correct in claiming that Williams’s plays in general, in order to appeal to a middlebrow audience, “bear upon the whole pattern of relations in the sex/gender ideology” (188). A broad view of sexual identity allows Williams to portray in Period how “[b]oth the men and the women are in trouble,” while remaining faithful at least in part to the genial spirit of comedy (200).⁴ Period, so Sinfield suggests, responds, if with indirection and eventually reconciliation, to a particularly bitter question: “How do gay men destroy women[? . . .] By marrying them and being sexually unrewarding?” (201). Period, in other words, can as readily sustain a feminist reading as it can a queer reading, much like Robert Anderson’s 1953 Tea and Sympathy, a play that explicitly addresses male sexual orientation and that had a remarkable first run of over seven hundred performances. Anderson interestingly connects adolescent insecurity about sexual identity with the profound dissatisfaction of a woman trapped in marriage to a man’s man whose homophobia but preference for the company of his male students suggests that he is a closet case. Yet this loveless marriage endures despite the erotic mismatch, and heteronormality is established by the woman’s successful seduction of the embattled and confused young man. In Period, George and Ralph, the two husbands whose performance in every sense the play calls into question, are shown as punishing their wives—not intentionally, but in their failures as husbands. Williams poses a fundamental question to which his play, like those of Wilde, Maugham, Coward, and Anderson, offers no reassuring answers: why do men and women persist in marriage even after discovering themselves so miserable in it?

¶25

In anatomizing the discontents of the erotic life as convention regulates it, Williams’s serious comedy aligns itself most closely with the plays of Noël Coward, who occupied himself, if not exclusively, with dramatizing what Dietrich calls “the impossibility of marriage on the grounds of homosexuality,” a critique of social conventions that sometimes, if comically, he pushed into misogyny (161). His Private Lives (1930), Design for Living (1932), and Blithe Spirit (1941) are counted as classics of modern theater. Their comic surfaces (the charismatic and quick-tongued Coward wrote the male leads for himself) screened these subversive themes with the rapid-fire badinage for which the playwright was famous. He was, as Lahr in his biography of Coward points out, “a performer who wrote,” and his seemingly frivolous works were “primarily vehicles to launch his elegant persona on the world” (Coward 1). And yet, Lahr observes, this “frivolity celebrates a metaphysical stalemate, calling it quits with meanings and certainties,” as what Lahr calls “the homosexual sense of the capriciousness of life” is embodied in “a capricious style” (3). These three comedies quickly found their way to both Broadway and the silver screen. Unlike Coward’s light dramas, they have been accorded the compliment of revival productions, claiming places in the commercial and amateur theater standard repertoire now that Coward has been taken seriously by the critical and theatrical establishment.⁵

¶26

More radically than both Wilde and Maugham, Coward moves beyond marriage to explore alternative forms of living. Design leads its three characters past traditional marriage to the prospect of a ménage à trois in which the cultural connection between sexual exclusiveness and happiness is deconstructed. More fantastically, Spirit promotes the splendid isolation of celibacy as a solution to the essential incompatibility of men and women. A husband whose wives, though dead, continue as hectoring ghosts comes to enjoy a solitariness of sorts, as an unbridgeable ontological barrier prevents them from dominating him completely. Private Lives, in contrast, takes up what sociologists would soon call “serial monogamy”: the play explores the erotic boredom and various resentments engendered by what can seem endless intimacy in marriage and undermines the idea that divorce and remarriage offer a solution. As Jean Chothia observes, the play redefines comic tradition by putting “divorce and separation firmly on the stage,” even while declining to “work through to complete reconciliation and new harmony.” Closure fails, as “the betrayals, the topsy-turvy events, the continual changing of partners in the dance, look set to continue indefinitely” (112). When Coward’s play was enjoying its initial runs in both the United States and United Kingdom, Hollywood was just embarking on a production trend that is rightly labeled “the comedy of remarriage” (see Cavell for a classic account). Private Lives and Period challenge, in different ways, this modern accommodation of the vagaries of desire, and both undermine the notion that respectful compromise is a no-fail path to peace and compatibility. Period’s critique of conventional marriage might indeed be the result of what Pettit terms Williams’s uncertain rebellion against heteronormality but might just as easily (and simultaneously) be interpreted as an homage to Private Lives and the workings of irresolution in this tradition of serious comedy.

¶27

In any case, the structural resemblances between the two plays are too close to be merely coincidental, even though Williams adds a striking homosocial focus that is largely absent in the Coward original—or, at most, is present but well veiled (see Farfan for such an interpretation). Period sustains a queer reading since it floats the possibility of a same-sex partnership between its two feckless males, Ralph and George (formerly comrades in the Korean war), as a solution to the romantic and personal difficulties of the two couples. Much of the play is devoted to anatomizing the husbands’ deep dissatisfaction with the wives who puzzle, annoy, and bore them. Ralph and George remember with considerable nostalgia time spent together in military service abroad (and the opportunity for consequence-free sexual indulgence with prostitutes that this life afforded). While accepting, if reluctantly, their roles in society, both wish they could return to a world that felt more male and did not force them to perform in the bedroom and at work.

¶28

Private Lives comments on the foibles of interpersonal relationships in the detached, frivolous manner typical of Coward’s dramatization of human nature. The play is critical of marriage, monogamy, the unstable intensities of desire, and, most of all, the frightening violence to which intense emotional attachment can lead. Coward, as Lahr and others have argued, offers up a queer perspective on the sorry spectacle of heterosexual (un)couplings. And yet Coward focuses on the Catullan paradoxes of the contrary but complementary emotions that link Elyot to Amanda while driving them apart. Amanda and Elyot are passionately in love, and yet because they are both intense, intelligent, and volatile they have found it impossible to live together without arguments that degenerate into physical violence. After three years of passion and mutual abuse, their marriage ended in divorce. As the play opens, five years have passed, and both Elyot and Amanda have found more-accommodating but less exciting partners.

¶29

Yet it seems that the pair cannot escape being together. As chance would have it, Elyot and Sybil (Elyot’s new wife) are honeymooning at a Deauville hotel. In the adjoining room with connecting balcony are Amanda and Victor, also celebrating the beginning of their marriage. Encountering each other, Amanda and Elyot quickly discover that, just as both Sybil and Victor had feared, their passion has not cooled. Inevitably, however, they soon find themselves consumed by yet another angry argument. Victor and Sybil, cast aside, discover that they too have a mutual attraction, and they act on it. Yet by the finale this newly formed couple is embroiled in a violent argument they barely manage to quell. Elyot and Amanda simply steal away from this coupling gone bad as the curtain falls, well aware that they will soon make each other miserable but acknowledging that their passion will not die.

¶30

Ralph and George, in contrast, must resume their customary places in the social order after an adjustment reveals the impossibility of change. Williams retains Coward’s basic plot—two couples, brought together at a moment of crisis, whose reunion confirms the strength and endurance of a previous attachment between one from each pair, prompting a reevaluation of the present pairings. Period riffs interestingly on Coward’s foundational irony (the honeymoon that signals the end of an erotic connection, not its solidification), replaying the encounter between the two couples to make it turn on the rekindling of the deep friendship between the two husbands. Both plays begin where traditional comedy ends: the honeymooning marriage bed, where passion plays itself out in sexual indulgence, sealing the relationship in the act traditionally called consummation. The plays, however—like life—immediately make available other possibilities. Elyot reconnects with Amanda, and Sybil finds an irresistible new partner in Victor; Ralph and George are each attracted to the other’s wife but also emotionally drawn to each other. What will be the final result of these new possibilities, erotic or otherwise?

¶31

The finale of Private Lives is inconclusion writ large, but its polymorphism remains within the boundaries of an expanding late–Jazz Age heteronormality. The increasing social acceptability of divorce in post-Victorian culture was affirming the emotional value of such recouplings and acknowledging the inevitable changes in the intensity and object of desire. Coward probes the limits of this modern accommodation of shifting sexual attraction—even promiscuity—by locating the source of dramatic disorder in two second marriages, whose collapse not only suggests the pointlessness of divorce but, even worse, also reinstates a past that presages further misery for Elyot and Amanda. Here is a new beginning that is neither new nor a beginning. Even more threatening to social convention, however, is the unexpected, rapid pairing of Victor and Sybil, whose newly found love quickly turns to jealousy and acrimony. In Period, the possibility of partner-switching is foreclosed ideologically. Yet the play treats with poignancy and some sadness the desire of the two miserable husbands for the renewal of their shared comradeship. That same-sex moyen de vivre, even emptied of the erotic, is quickly revealed as impossible even under the covers of friendship or a jointly operated business.

¶32

Ralph and George are, simply, “happiest being buddies again,” as Sinfield points out, and nothing in the play’s conclusion dims their evident joy in having found each other once again (200). In the afterglow of this reunion, the two even imagine briefly that they might set up as cattle ranchers without their wives in a West conceived as empty of matrimonial and employment imperatives. This flight of fancy seems only in part a nostalgic wish for a vanished past in which male dominance was more easily exerted over would-be controlling women (the sort of wish fulfillment to which Spirit gives a different, and thoroughly fantastical, form). Ralph and George, casting themselves in the role of American Adams, fleetingly conjure up a wide-open, Edenic space that has not suffered the fall into adult heterosexual life, with its duties to provide and to satisfy. This same terrain, metaphorically as well as physically, is explored in Annie Proulx’s story “Brokeback Mountain,” which dramatizes in a fully tragic mode the “homosexual sense of the capriciousness of life” and the inevitable failures of a marriage that makes no room for desire for other objects.

¶33

Williams must have realized that pursuing comedy invested in exploring this disturbing theme was a gamble, and not only because he risked being accused of abandoning art for entertainment. Such comedy, whose true inventor is George Bernard Shaw, is in effect an anti-generic genre. Many examples, like Period, lack the sense of capricious frivolity achieved by Coward, who was deft at blunting with humor his social radicalism. Such comedy features instead what Martin Meisel, discussing Shaw’s practice, terms “genre anti-types” that force audiences to witness “recognizable conventions . . . explode” as they are shown to be “humorously inadequate to account for reality” (91). But the subversion of conventions through the introduction of uncomfortable realities might be misunderstood as failed construction, as indeed it was by reviewers like Simon, many of whom were convinced that Williams was writing against his own grain and had no gift for the form. Failure at the box office, and with the critics, meant that he would not attempt a repeat performance and would not continue crafting a different métier.

¶34

Perhaps the time was just not right. Interestingly, Williams was not the only major playwright whose 1960 production of a serious comedy defying comic conventions turned out to be a resounding flop. Produced on the West End stage, Coward’s Waiting in the Wings was similarly faulted for violating comic norms, only to be reevaluated more sympathetically for its nuanced development of a serious theme after a 1999 Broadway revival. Simon admits that the play is “bittersweet,” not heartwarming, and lacking in the sparkle and wit associated with Coward. Yet Waiting is also a “wise and compassionate address of the problems of aging and death that confront us all,” reflecting Coward’s experience working in the 1930s with actors’ charities and retirement homes like the one in which the play is set (“Waiting”). It also seems just that the London revival production of Period in 2006 has prompted a reevaluation of what Williams accomplished in his one attempt at writing serious comedy. In his review in the Guardian, Michael Billington observes that, “generally regarded as an aberrant deviation into comedy [. . . , Period] emerges as an intriguing play that touches on many of Williams’ major themes: loneliness, fear, impotence, and the need for consoling human warmth.” This report is a welcome corrective, emphasizing Williams’s success in dramatizing the discontents of modern life and, especially, of matrimony, but the critic need not have stopped at praising the play’s intricate handling of sexual politics. Period deserves also to be remembered for its inspired reinvention of the formal and thematic structure of Private Lives, and, more generally, for its homage to the important dramatic tradition in which both these plays were significant entrants.

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