The skin of our teeth : play in three actsbyThornton Wilder

The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) is a play by Thornton Wilder. The play won him his second Pulitzer Prize for Drama, third Pultzer Prize overall following The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) for Novels and Our Town (1938) for Drama. The book was his sixth play and perhaps most ambitious.

After trial runs in New Haven, Connecticut, and Baltimore, Maryland, the play opened on Broadway at the Plymouth Theater on November 18, 1942. The production — directed by Elia Kazan and starring Tallulah Bankhead (Sabina), Frederic March (Mr. Antrobus), and Florence Eldridge (Mrs. Antrobus) — received positive reviews and ran for 355 performances. Audiences and critics applauded Wilder’s unconventional drama about the history of humankind. Most reviewers agreed that the playwright had produced a work that would revitalize American theater; as Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New York Times,” The Skin of Our Teeth stands head and shoulders above the monotonous plane of our moribund theater — an original, gay-hearted play that is now and again profoundly moving, as a genuine comedy should be.”

Disrupting traditional notions of linear time, Wilder’s play tells the story of the twentieth-century American Antrobus family in three acts which recount such epochal events as the onset of the Ice Age, the start of Great Flood, and the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Ending exactly as it began, the play illustrates the cyclical nature of existence, celebrating humanity’s resilience, inventiveness, and will to survive. Although the play offers an age-old message, it does so in an untraditional form, rejecting the conventions of naturalistic drama. Not only do the characters appear to be both middle-class Americans and allegorical figures, but they also repeatedly drop out of character and speak directly to the audience, breaking theatrical illusion and reminding viewers that they are watching a play. Combining modern theatrical experiments and timeless human themes, Wilder produced a work that would both challenge and entertain generations of Americans. Along with Our Town (1938), The Skin of Our Teeth is considered Wilder’s theatrical masterpiece and an invaluable cornerstone of modern American drama.


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Overview
The main characters of the play are George and Maggie Antrobus (from Greek: άνθρωπος, "human" or "person"), their two children, Henry and Gladys, and Sabina, who appears as the family's maid in the first and third acts, and as a beauty queen temptress in the second act. The play's action takes place in a modern setting, but is full of anachronisms reaching back to prehistoric times. The characters' roles as archetypes are emphasized by their identification with Biblical and classical personalities (see below).

For example, the name Lilly Sabina is a reference to the myth of Lilith (see,for instance, Lilith: Kabballa) and to the historical rape of the Sabine women, identifications made relatively explicit in the play's text. Henry Antrobus's name was changed from "Cain", following his murder of his brother Abel. This is a story from the Bible, in which Cain, the son of Adam, murders his brother Abel after God favors Abel over Cain regarding gifts. This implies that George Antrobus is Adam, and Maggie Antrobus Eve, further supported by an event at the beginning of the play when Mr. Antrobus composes a song for his wife in honor of their anniversary, in which the lyrics: "Happy w'dding ann'vers'ry dear Eva" appear, though Mrs. Antrobus is referred to as Maggie throughout the play.

The murder of Abel is an underlying theme in the play, Mr. Antrobus pays far more attention to his "perfect" third child Gladys than he does Henry, because of the murder of his favorite child. As this treatment of Henry continues, throughout the acts is seen progression of Henry slowly becoming more angry with his family, which reaches its climax in the third act.

While the Antrobus family remains constant throughout the play, the three acts do not form a continuous narrative. The first act takes place during an impending ice age, in the second act the family circumstances have changed as George becomes president of the Fraternal Order of Mammals (apparent references to Sodom and Gommorah but also to the Roaring Twenties), and the end of the world approaches a second time; the third act opens with Maggie and Gladys emerging from a bunker at the end of a seven-year-long war.

An additional layer of stylistic complexity is added by the occasional interruption of the narrative scene by actors directly addressing the audience. For instance, in the first scene, the actress playing Sabina reveals her misgivings to the audience about the play, in the second act she refuses to say lines in the play and tells the spectators things that cause a woman in the audience to run from the theatre sobbing, and, in the third act, the actor playing Mr. Antrobus interrupts to announce that several actors have taken ill, and asks the audience to indulge them while the "stage manager" of the play conducts a rehearsal with the replacements.

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Themes

• Mankind's history repeats itself, but as a gradually (with kinks and spurts) upwardly spiralling gyre, with ever increasing global interaction and growing human capacity for destruction and for good; however, the fundamentals of human character and human needs remain much the same.
• Sabina's stock-maid monologue begins and ends the play in the same way--this "stage-play" goes on and on.
• In her role as resident pessimist, lacking vision, Sabina says, "That's all we do—always beginning again! Over and over again. Always beginning again." After each disaster, they just rebuild the world again. She also says: "Don't forget that a few years ago we came through the depression by the skin of our teeth! One more tight squeeze like that and where will we be?" And later she says,..."My nerves can't stand it. But if you have any ideas about improving this crazy old world, I'm really with you. I really am."
• The Ice Age/The Great Flood; we are always plagued by the potential for disaster, both natural and man-made.
• Art and literature are ways of advancing our humanity: empathy, tolerance, vision.
• But technology doesn't necessarily advance human nature.
• In general, and most certainly in these remarks, Thematics is an impoverished way to experience a play.

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Plot

Act I

Act one is an amalgam of early 20th century New Jersey and the dawn of the Ice Age. The father is inventing things such as the lever, the wheel, the alphabet, and multiplication tables. The family (the Antrobuses) and the entire north-eastern U.S. face extinction by a wall of ice moving southward from Canada. The story is introduced by a narrator and further expanded by the family maid, Sabina. There are unsettling parallels between the members of the Antrobus family and various characters from the Bible. In addition, time is compressed and scrambled to such an extent that the refugees who arrive at the Antrobus house seeking food and fire include the Old Testament judge Moses, the ancient Greek poet Homer, and women who are identified as Muses.


Act II

Act II takes place on the Boardwalk at Atlantic City, NJ, where the Antrobuses are present for George's swearing-in as president of the Ancient and Honorable Order of Mammals, Subdivision Humans. Sabina is present, also, in the guise of a scheming beauty queen, who tries to steal George's affection from his wife and family. Although the conventioneers are rowdy and partying furiously, there is an undercurrent of foreboding, since the weather signals change from summery sunshine to hurricane to deluge. (A fortune teller had previously attempted to warn them about this but had been ignored). Gladys and George each attempt their individual rebellions, and are brought back into line by the family. The act ends with the family members reconciled and, paralleling the Bibilical story of Noah's Ark, directing pairs of animals to safety on a large boat where they survive the storm and/or the end of the world.


Act III

The final act takes place in the ruins of the Antrobuses' former home. A devastating war has occurred; Maggie and Gladys have survived by hiding in a cellar. When they come out of the cellar we see that Gladys has a baby. George has been away at the front lines leading an army. Henry also fought, on the opposite side, and returns as a general. The family members discuss the ability of the human race to rebuild and continue after continually destroying itself. The question is raised, 'is there any accomplishment or attribute of the human race of enough value that its civilization should be rebuilt'?

The stage manager interrupts the play-within-the-play to explain that several members of their company can't do their parts because they're sick (possibly with food poisoning: the actress playing Sabina claims she saw blue mold on the lemon meringue pie at dinner). The stage manager drafts a janitor, a dresser, and other non-actors to fill their parts, which involve quoting philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle to mark the passing of time within the play.

The alternate history action ends where it began, with Sabina dusting the living room and worrying about George's arrival from the office. Her final act is to address the audience and turn over the responsibility of continuing the action, or life, to them.

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Influence and Criticism
Similarities between the play and the James Joyce novel Finnegans Wake were noted in the Saturday Review during the play's run on Broadway. Norman Cousins, editor of the Review, printed a short article by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson titled "The Skin of Whose Teeth? The Strange Case of Mr. Wilder's New Play and Finnegan's Wake" in the issue for December 19, 1942, with a second part in the February 13, 1943 issue.


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Product Description
A timeless statement about human foibles . . . and human endurance, this beautiful new edition features Wilder's unpublished production notes, diary entries, and other illuminating documentary material, all of which is included in a new Afterword by Tappan Wilder.

Time magazine called The Skin of Our Teeth "a sort of Hellzapoppin' with brains," as it broke from established theatrical conventions and walked off with the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Best Drama. Combining farce, burlesque, and satire (among other styles), Thornton Wilder departs from his studied use of nostalgia and sentiment in Our Town to have an Eternal Family narrowly escape one disaster after another, from ancient times to the present. Meet George and Maggie Antrobus (married only 5,000 years); their two children, Gladys and Henry (perfect in every way!); and their maid, Sabina (the ageless vamp) as they overcome ice, flood, and war -- by the skin of their teeth.