The Skin of Our Teeth

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Skin of Our Teeth, The (1942), a play by Thornton Wilder. [Plymouth Theatre, 359 perf.; Pulitzer Prize.] Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus ( Fredric March and Florence Eldridge) live in a modern home in Excelsior, New Jersey, with their malevolent son, Henry ( Montgomery Clift), their giddy daughter, Gladys ( Frances Heflin), and their pet mammoth and pet dinosaur. Although the advancing Ice Age is threatening to destroy their home and world, the Antrobuses survive to no small extent because Mr. Antrobus is inventive enough to create the wheel and the alphabet (while his wife discovers sewing and cooking), and he is enlightened enough to encourage art and learning. Nor can he be seduced by their aggressive maid, Sabina ( Tallulah Bankhead). Eons later, on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, Mr. Antrobus is elected president at the convention of the Ancient and Honorable Order of Mammals. A cassandric fortune‐teller ( Florence Reed) spouts gloom and doom as the murderous Henry continues to attack those he hates; Sabina, made a beauty queen, still determines to lure Mr. Antrobus away from his wife; and a deluge arises to engulf the world. Mr. Antrobus manages to get pairs of animals aboard an ark before the waters destroy them. Yet the flood has scarcely passed when a great war decimates civilization. Not even this can discourage Mr. Antrobus, who determines to build a better new world. At this point Sabina begins the same scene she had at the play's opening, only to stop and add, “This is where you came in. We have to go on for ages and ages. You go home. The end of the play isn't written yet.” Wilder's modern allegory, which juxtaposed biblical events with such modern phenomena as the Miss America Pageant, baffled many tryout critics but was an instant success in New York. Students have seen in it strong influences not only of expressionist and epic theatre but also of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. The original production was aided immeasurably by Bankhead's tour‐de‐force performance, which allowed her to be both siren and liaison with the audience, by Elia Kazan's fluid direction, and by Albert Johnson's surrealistic settings and his use of projection screens. The play remains one of the few effective stage allegories and is still revived with some regularity. Major mountings have included a 1945 English production, a 1955 New York production, an international tour in 1961 assisted by the State Department, and a Central Park revival in 1998.

Skin of Our Teeth, The, comedy by Thornton Wilder, produced and published in 1942, winning a Pulitzer Prize. The unconventional use of theatrical devices, such as asides and interruptions, increases the audience's feeling of participation.

George Antrobus, his wife, and his son and daughter represent humanity—the parents are Adam and Eve, and their son Henry is Cain—engaged in the struggle to survive. Their home in Excelsior, N.J., is threatened first by a creeping wall of ice, and later by a long war. Each time they barely escape annihilation, but George, inventor of the alphabet and the wheel, maintains the continuity of learning and culture. Lily Sabina, their maid, the eternal Lilith, nearly succeeds in winning George away from his wife on the Atlantic City boardwalk during a convention of which George is elected president. Constructive attitudes prevail after the war, in which Henry is the enemy. Having reassembled his family, George feels the “most important thing of all: The desire to begin again to start build‐ing,” and seeks his books to guide him in his struggle.