Inside 'The Skin of Our Teeth'

Opening our 2017 season is Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, which the playwright himself called “The most ambitious project I have ever approached.”

The original Broadway poster for The Skin of Our Teeth, 1942.

Relishing in staging the seemingly absurd and impossible, the play centers on an outwardly normal suburban family from the fictional town of Excelsior, New Jersey. It soon becomes apparent, however, that the world of the Antrobus family is anything but normal: dinosaurs prowl through the living room, characters address the audience, backstage crew enter and speak, and the set is disintegrating. This “so-called” New Jersey is merely the starting point for navigating 5,000 years of family antics and apocalyptic disasters. Through an Ice Age, Flood, and World War, the play’s title (Job 19:20  I am escaped with the skin of my teeth) makes the point clear: no matter how narrow the escape, the human race survives.

Simultaneously taking place in contemporary and prehistoric times, the set-up can sound confusing until considering another “modern stone-age family”. The Flintstones (1960’s) was a clear cave-man take on the popular family sitcom The Honeymooners (1950’s). Though the cartoon was both an absurd and satirical social commentary, it only takes the intro for The Flintstones to make sense. The Skin of Our Teeth invites audiences into a similar situation: Biblical archetypes mix with mid-century American dynamics to create something absurdly silly and still profoundly compelling. Instead of cartoons, the zaniness is theatre itself. The characters in The Skin of Our Teeth are actors putting up ‘The Skin of Our Teeth’, and regularly step out of character to complain about their roles or whenever the play feels particularly incomprehensible. With innocent and childlike disruptiveness, Wilder explodes ideas and characters not strictly confined to literal time. With little control over where we’ve been, where we’re going, or what might happen to us along the way, the audience (like humanity) is meant to hang on for the ride and get through it together.

Two of the play's famous leading ladies: (Left) Vivien Leigh in a 1946 production at the Piccadilly Theatre. (Right) Tallulah Bankhead originated Sabina on Broadway in 1942. Photo copyright First Night Vintage.

 When The Skin of Our Teeth premiered at New Haven’s Shubert Theatre on October 15, 1942, it received a notoriously mixed reaction (legend tells of patrons racing from the theatre at first intermission). At its New York premiere a month later, it received significantly warmer reception. In 1943, it won the Pulitzer Prize. Breaking nearly every established theatrical convention, the epic comedy-drama rightfully earned its place as the most unorthodox of classic American comedies and the assertion that “no other American play has ever come anywhere near it.” (James Woolcott, theatre critic).

Wilder had firmly established his literary reputation as a novelist with his immensely popular, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), which won his first Pulitzer Prize. In the 30’s, he began writing plays for Broadway and utilizing unusual structures and techniques. Our Town (1938), his best-known and most frequently performed work, broke ground with its bare stage setting and time navigating narrator. Earning Wilder his second Pulitzer Prize, it also demonstrates his long-standing fascination with the effects of the passage of time on individuals and societies. That preoccupation also surfaces in The Skin of Our Teeth, which emerged onto stages just as America (and Wilder himself) entered World War II. He later reflected that “It was written on the eve of our entrance into the war and under strong emotion, and I think it mostly comes alive under conditions of crisis.”

He was writing it as the world was descending into chaos. I think everybody was wondering: “Will we get through this? And if we do, what then? Will we learn anything? Will we grow or change or do it better the next time?"... The characters are continually hitting rock bottom and then finding a way – and it’s usually with the help of other people – to have the hope to move forward, despite the catastrophic situation that is facing them in that immediate moment. 

- Arin Arbus 

 New York Times: Why Thornton Wilder Matters in the Trump Era

 In later years Wilder was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and his  novel, The Eighth Day (1967), earned the National Book Award. In 1975, Wilder died in his sleep in Hamden Connecticut, where he lived with his sister.

Three time Pulitzer Prize winning novelist & playwright, Thornton Wilder.

One of the toughest and most complicated minds in American Theatre, Wilder’s plays have so affected theatre tradition that few serious dramatists ignore them. Their singular humanity and artistic vision continue to resonate well beyond his time.

Any play with three apocalypses, talking dinosaurs, and characters who refuse to say their lines is clearly aiming high. But when that play has a housemaid tell us in her opening speech that it will address all “the troubles the human race has gone through,” it may seem destined for ambitious failure. The Skin of Our Teeth, however, succeeds. A vast, symbolic play about all of humanity, Thornton Wilder’s masterpiece is also a witty, compassionate look at the struggles of a single family. Sure, the Antrobus clan (whose name derives from the Greek for humanity) may weather the calamities of ice ages, floods, and wars, but they also face the struggle of raising children, going to work, and trying to stay faithful for five thousand years. With staggering imagination, Wilder reminds us that the destruction and rebirth on his stage take their shape from the cycle of our own lives. It’s no accident that Sabina, the saucy housemaid who directly addresses us with her analysis of the play, closes by insisting, “We have to go on for ages and ages yet.” Onstage or off, she’s telling us, we’re all enduing the same old thing. 

- Mark Blankenship 

Notes on the End of the World, The Thornton Wilder Society

Join us at the end of this month as we attempt to stage the survival of the entire human race. It's a rare and exciting opportunity to catch 'The Skin of Our Teeth', at Rosebud Theatre, March 31 - June 3. For tickets and further information, visit rosebudtheatre.com