IMPRESSIVE DEBUT : MARITAL COMEDY WELL-STAGED

CORONADO —  Nat Modica’s assertive and authoritative staging of “Period of Adjustment” at the Coronado Playhouse thoughtfully holds Tennessee Williams’ little marital comedy to the light so that we can watch each element refract into its limited color range.

“Period of Adjustment” is no masterpiece, but it is a carefully--even assiduously--crafted commercial comedy, sculpted by a master.

While Williams loved the common and provincial, his greatness was in setting off universal emotional temblors with a menagerie of thoroughly prosaic characters. In “Period of Adjustment” it’s as though the author could sense an impending accumulation of hokey-ness as he threshed out his feelings about the healing power of love and trust and the need to adjust and reconcile. At the most serious moments in the play, Williams has undercut the weight of such ideas to trick the audience with quick, self-mocking comic reversals.

Actually that technique, which Modica handles with amazing grace, allows Williams to lay out his ideas anyway, but in a Brechtian manner that tends to keep the playgoer once-removed from the characters and their situation.

It’s rare that we see a company in the semi-professional ranks so finely tuned to the essence of a play and so capably hammering nail after authorial nail neatly on the button. Mark Anthony (whom we last saw as a loutish ex-husband in “Father’s Day” at the Bowery Theater) establishes a level of maturity, wisdom and frustration as Ralph Bates, a middle-aged man revolting against an archetypal suburban life style in his “Spanish-type stucco cottage on a high point over a cavern.”

Subtitled “Or High Point Is Built on a Cavern,” the play quietly juxtaposes Ralph’s secure but desiccated life working for his father-in-law with the more risky all-American dream of doing one’s own true thing. Onto this theme of self-communication and self-fulfillment, Williams has grafted as a generally comical metaphor the problems of communication in love, including sexual impotence.

Ralph is visited by a just-married Army buddy, George Haverstick, and his new bride. They are having massive marital problems on the day after their wedding, partly because George has just quit his job. It is Christmas Eve.

In the role of George, Rick Bollinger has his character’s attractive good looks, and visually hints at the repressed violence of a man completely baffled by his virgin bride. As his wife, Isabel, says, George is “so handsome and afflicted.” Indeed, Bollinger is beside himself because of his virile palsy--the shakes--his impotence, and because of not knowing how to communicate his love. Their wedding night, as they recall it, was a comic nightmare in which he got drunk and naked and she locked herself in the bathroom.

Paulette Hanefeld plays Isabel, screeching at the top of her range for nearly half the show--and somehow makes it all seem natural--as a sweet, emotionally short-circuiting bride who’s certain she’s married a monster.

Pat Olafson appears late in the play as the experienced female balance to Ralph--dignified, vulnerable, wanting to get back together--as Dorothea, his homely wife of five years who has just left him because he too has quit his job with her father. Anne Harris and Cezar Banks do some highly supportive work as Dorothea’s mean-spirited parents. Banks’ role is double cast with Doug Smalheer.

Modica’s company, though using the Coronado stage, is a separate entity known as the American Theatre Heritage, and is dedicated to producing American plays written from the 1930s to the 1960s. A.T.H. makes an impressive debut with “Period of Adjustment.” Its design is as painstakingly thought out as the play’s difficult characterizations and equally well-realized, especially in view of the show’s spindly budget.

If mid-20th-Century American theater is your cup of tea, catch this production which needs no adjustments--but dress for summmer as the theater gets awfully warm for Christmas.

“PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT,” Tennessee Williams’ comedy at the Coronado Playhouse. Directed by Nat Modica. Lighting design by Jim Roth. Sound design by Hugh C. Litfin and Nat Modica. Costume and scenic design by Nat Modica. Stage manager, Christine Montgomery. With Mark Anthony, Paulette Hanefeld, Rick Bollinger, Anne Harris, Doug Smalheer, Cezar Banks and Pat Olafson. Performances continue Thursdays through Sundays at 8 p.m. through Aug. 30.