Tennessee Williams did not become famous for writing sitcoms—or any kind of comedies (although there's considerable comedy in Baby Doll, The Rose Tattoo, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). "Period of Adjustment" is a genuine romantic comedy taking place on Christmas Eve in Highpoint, a suburban Memphis development, albeit one that is sinking into the abyss (OK, only a subterranean cavern).
George Haverstick shows up on the doorstep of his Korean War flyboy buddy Ralph Bates with a highly flustered bride, Isabel, who had been George's nurse in a VA hospital, where he was being treated for "the shakes" (a post-traumatic-stress disorder). The wedding night did not go well, and Isabel is sick to death of hearing "White Christmas," which has been played over and over because it has been snowing as they drive in a lugubrious, old, black Cadillac, and because George quit his job and Isabel lost hers.
Ralph has also just quite his job working for his father-in-law, outraging his wife of six year, Dorothea, who has walked out (and whose parents come to repossess everything they gave the couple in Act Three). Considering his own impetuous actions, Ralph is remarkably sympathetic to the aggrieved bride and works hard to repair a marriage that has not begun well, while giving no quarter to his in-laws. George and Isabel are both stubborn and filled with quaint but incompatible notions about how things are 'spozed to be.
Dorothea, who does not appear onstage until midway through the third act, is painfully aware that Ralph married her to inherit the family business, and has an explanation for having walked out that takes Ralph (and at least this reader) by surprise. Chastened, wiser (and worn out from all the emoting) warring couples in many Williams plays reach new understandings of themselves and their antagonists/partners and the curtain falls on indications that the characters will live more happily having faced —very reluctantly — truths. Adjusting to partners with skins as thin as their own is not easy, but occurs, even as the walls crack.
In this venture, Ralph and Isabel are notable for having keen insight into others' neuroses, accompanying a nearly total lack of insight into themselves. (Isabel even recognizes that "very often people can be absolutely blind, stupid, and helpless about their own problems and still have a keen intuition about the problems of others.") The conflicts are dramatized effectively in one evening in one place (the Bates house).
The 1962 movie version suffers only slightly from censorship, gets out of the house, prunes well, leaving all the best lines and exchanges.
(The meaning of the line I've taken for my review's title, as explained by Ralph, applies widely in William's work: "If you took the human heart out of the human body and put a pair of legs on it and told it to walk a straight line, it couldn't do it. It never could pass the drunk test.")
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