Everything happens at once in ‘Skin of Our Teeth’
Dissatisfaction with what he was seeing on stage led Madison native Thornton Wilder to create the imaginative stage worlds of “Our Town” and “The Skin of Our Teeth,” both winners of the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
A passionate theater-goer since he was a boy, Wilder felt the theater of his time had lost vitality through too much attention to scenery and props that fixed the production in a specific time and place, “whereas it is precisely the glory of the stage that it is always ‘now’ there.”
“In its healthiest ages, the theater has always exhibited the least scenery,” Wilder wrote in a preface for “Our Town,” pointing to the theatrical worlds of Aristophanes and Lope de Vega as evidence.
He worked out his ideas in several one-act plays. In “The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden,” kitchen chairs stood in for an automobile. In “The Long Christmas Dinner,” a family suggests the passage of 90 Christmases without leaving the table. In “Pullman Car Hiawatha,” a stage manager opens the play with a speech (foreshadowing “Our Town”), chalks the floor where chairs will stand in for berths and later interprets the words of other characters for the audience.
Wilder sailed even further from theatrical realism with “The Skin of Our Teeth,” which premiered in 1942. Like his novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” this unusual comedy has a biblical antecedent: “I am nothing but skin and bones; I have escaped only by the skin of my teeth” (Job 19:20).
In “Our Town,” Wilder used the villagers of Grover’s Corners to represent the essentials of human experience: love, marriage, birth and death. In “The Skin of Our Teeth,” the Antrobus family lives out multiple generations of human experience, overlapping in the present moment of the stage. George Antrobus is both a 20th-century father and the inventor of the wheel and the alphabet; Sabina is both the family maid and a Napoleonic camp follower. Anachronistitellectual a dinosaur and mammoth linger outside in the cold, looking for a chance to slip into the Antrobus home in New Jersey, as a new ice age threatens to destroy humanity.
“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,” Wilder wrote of “Skin” in his preface to “Three Plays: ‘Our Town,’ ‘The Skin of Our Teeth,’ ‘The Matchmaker’,” noting the strong responses this play about human resilience received in postwar Germany and Poland.
Early in the play, Wilder anticipates some objections to “Skin” by having the actor playing Sabina break character to complain directly to the audience: “I don’t understand a single word of it, anyway — all about the troubles the human race has gone through, there’s a subject for you.”
Mr. Fitzpatrick, the stage manager, prods Sabina back into character and makes other appearances to keep the play, or humanity itself, functioning.
The play exposes its archetypal bedrock by gradually revealing that the bitter, angry Antrobus son, Henry, is also the biblical Cain who killed his brother Abel. Biographer Penelope Niven suggests the conflict between George and Henry reflects the difficult relationship Wilder had with his platitudinous father.
Each act of the play posits a threat that humanity barely survives: an ice age, a great flood, an apocalyptic war. Sabina wonders if it wouldn’t just be easier to die, but the resilient Antrobus spirit rubs off on her. As the glacier approaches New Jersey, the family builds a fire to warm their home. “Pass up your chairs, everybody,” she tells the audience. “Save the human race.”
In the beginning of Act III, the stage manager Mr. Fitzpatrick interrupts Sabina and brings up the house lights to report a distressing development: seven actors have become ill with food poisoning and are in the hospital. He has recruited volunteers to fill their spots — a dresser, a wardrobe mistress, a maid and an usher — and needs to rehearse them briefly before the play can resume. This amusing diversion also reflects the play’s core subject of human resilience in the face of crisis. Audiences suffering the deprivations of World War II and the postwar years would surely grasp the imperative to step forward and carry on, however unprepared a person might feel.
This play’s theatrical games and incally, concerns do not render it devoid of emotional moments, such as Mrs. Antrobus’ speech about a letter in a bottle with “all the things that a woman knows … never been told to any man.” Near the end of the play, in “the hours of the night” segment, the volunteer actors speak wisdom from Spinoza, Plato, Aristotle and the Book of Genesis, as though their words were rafts humanity could use to ride out the deluge.
This article is adapted from Jim Higgins’ “Wisconsin Literary Luminaries: From Laura Ingalls Wilder to Ayad Akhtar” (The History Press).