THEATER
Theater for a New Audience
The Skin of Our Teeth - Thornton Wilder
Directed by ARIN ARBUS
“HEARTFELT…VALIANT…MOVING…RESONANT…exceedingly whimsical and disturbingly familiar…with an air of ramshackle spontaneity…a celebratory glow pervades this millennia-spanning portrait of a single family’s survival against the odds.” – Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“’The Skin of Our Teeth’ is a masterpiece…This production triumphantly re-establishes ‘Skin’ as one of the finest American plays of the 20th century…Go to Brooklyn and see it now, and let your heart be lifted up.” – Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal
“A big, important American play has been reawakened for a historical moment that desperately needs it…Wilder’s text demands a directorial one-two punch–a joyous spirit that can sustain the superficial brightness while keeping a firm grasp on its dark underpinnings. Arin Arbus’s production gets more of both than I’ve experienced in any previous staging.”
“A fantastic production” – Jesse David Fox, New York Magazine/Vulture
“It’s a treat to see this seminal work on its feet.” – Adam Feldman, Time Out New York
“Anyone who hasn’t seen this show yet should not waste a moment to see it done with verve and determination…A fascinating and moving presentation by Arin Arbus.” – Michael Giltz, The Huffington Post
Thornton Wilder won three Pulitzers — the only author to win for a novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and two plays, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, which was written just before America entered WWII. The play is about fortitude and the fate of humanity, both at the moment Wilder wrote it and this moment now and at millions of earlier moments over thousands of years. And in a thousand years, if people are still on earth, the play will be about them too.
The Skin of Our Teeth takes place in a prehistoric world and the New Jersey suburbs. The Antrobus family–George and Maggie, their children, Gladys and Henry, and Sabina, a maid who is also George’s mistress–survive the Ice Age, the Flood, and war. Combining tragedy with comedy, wit, intelligence, imagination, and scenic surprise, the play, as Francis Fergusson wrote, is a “marriage of Plato and Groucho Marx.”
‘The Skin of Our Teeth’ Review: The Underknown Masterpiece
Travel through the eons with a 5,000-year-old family in Thornton Wilder’s rarely staged historical pageant-cum-knockabout comedy.
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth” is the Great White Whale of American theater, a masterpiece that nobody has seen. That’s not strictly true, of course: It still gets done by amateur troupes, and ambitious regional companies also take it on from time to time. But “The Skin of Our Teeth,” which was first performed on Broadway in a 1942 production directed by Elia Kazan and starring Tallulah Bankhead, Montgomery Clift and Fredric March, calls for a cast of 30, thus making it prohibitively costly to produce commercially today. It hasn’t been seen on Broadway since a 1975 revival that closed after seven performances. The last full-scale New York production, a poorly received Shakespeare in the Park version, took place 19 years ago.
For all these reasons, Theatre for a New Audience’s Brooklyn revival would be a major event even if it weren’t any good—and it is, praise be, quite extraordinarily good. Directed by Arin Arbus in a lively, imaginative manner that is faithful both to the spirit and the letter of Wilder’s text, this production triumphantly re-establishes “The Skin of Our Teeth” as one of the finest American plays of the 20th century, a modern classic that ought to be seen as often as “Our Town.” It’s unlikely that any other revival of the season will be as consequential.More than most plays, you have to see “The Skin of Our Teeth” to appreciate its virtues. On paper it can sound twee, a historical pageant disguised as a “You Can’t Take It With You”-type knockabout comedy featuring the Antrobuses, a seemingly ordinary middle-class family whose members aren’t quite so ordinary as they seem. It emerges that Mr. Antrobus (David Rasche) is, among other things, the inventor of the alphabet and the wheel; that he, his wife (Kecia Lewis), his two children (Kimber Monroe and Reynaldo Piniella) and their maid (Mary Wiseman) are all 5,000 years old, more or less; and that the first act takes place during the Ice Age, which is why the Antrobus’s pets are a mammoth and a dinosaur. In the second act, they cope with the Great Flood, while the third picks up their story immediately after World War II.
What on earth (so to speak) is going on here? “The Skin of Our Teeth” was first performed at a time when America was fighting a war whose outcome was still far from certain. Wilder sought to remind his viewers that humankind has survived unimaginable horrors throughout its long, bloody history, and will—or, rather, can—continue to prevail so long as it can muster the courage to push back against the darkness. The words he puts in Mr. Antrobus’s mouth in the final scene leave no doubt of his purpose: “I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for—whether it’s a field, or a home, or a country.”If that speech sounds the least little bit preachy…well, it is. But Wilder took care to steer clear of sermonizing elsewhere by making most of “The Skin of Our Teeth” a wonderfully fanciful romp, a theatrical mixtape into which snippets of “Finnegans Wake” and the Book of Genesis, as well as a dollop of “Our Town,” are spliced. Wilder himself called it a “tragicomedy,” but the tragedy’s outcome, as Sabina, the sexy maid first played by Bankhead, explains at evening’s end, depends on us: “You go home. The end of this play isn’t written yet.”
It wouldn’t be hard—especially now—to superimpose an up-to-the-second High Directorial Concept (#resist, anyone?) on Wilder’s near-childlike optimism. To her infinite credit, Ms. Arbus declines the invitation. Instead, she turns her cast loose on Riccardo Hernandez’s wide-open set, most of which amounts to a giant gable and two walls, and encourages them to speak Wilder’s lines with an energy and simplicity of intent that are unspoiled by gratuitous cleverness. The effect is joyously festive, and when the time comes at last for the cast to modulate into a key of high seriousness, you find yourself filled with hope. I do wish that César Alvarez, the show’s music director, hadn’t inserted a mawkish original song called “Home Alone” just before the final lines of the play: It’s a mistake, and a bad one, but far from fatal. Save for this one false move, Ms. Arbus’s staging is successful in every way.The ever-excellent Mr. Rasche and his colleagues all give outstanding performances that serve the play admirably. That said, if one or more of them were to be replaced by actors with star power—I’m thinking of Nathan Lane, perhaps with Nina Arianda as Sabina—then it might be possible to move this revival to Broadway. That’s where it belongs, just as “The Skin of Our Teeth” belonged there in 1942. Don’t count on any such miracle, though: Go to Brooklyn and see it now, and let your heart be lifted up.
—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, is the author, most recently, of “Satchmo at the Waldorf.” Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.
Tonight's moon from our apartment...
he Bridge of San Luis Rey, and two plays, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, which was written just before America entered WWII. The play is about fortitude and the fate of humanity, both at the moment Wilder wrote it and this moment now and at millions of earlier moments over thousands of years. And in a thousand years, if people are still on earth, the play will be about them too.
The Skin of Our Teeth takes place in a prehistoric world and the New Jersey suburbs. The Antrobus family–George and Maggie, their children, Gladys and Henry, and Sabina, a maid who is also George’s mistress–survive the Ice Age, the Flood, and war. Combining tragedy with comedy, wit, intelligence, imagination, and scenic surprise, the play, as Francis Fergusson wrote, is a “marriage of Plato and Groucho Marx.”
No comments:
Post a Comment