Our Town: ‘The Skin of Our Teeth’ revival asks hard questions

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Our Town: ‘The Skin of Our Teeth’ revival asks hard questions
The amazing second act set in the Thornton Wilder play “Skin of Our Teeth”, fun slide and all”)

Playwrights write plays to answer the big questions. Thornton Wilder’s 1942 Pulitzer Prize winning play “The Skin of Our Teeth” asked the biggest questions of all. Question such as “Do we need families?” “Is marriage worth the effort?” “Should we keep promises?” and the best of all “Why do men like to invent things?”

Under the able directorship of Lileana Blain-Cruz, the Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont staged a revival of this classic piece of absurdist theater.

“The Skin of Our Teeth” is as far as Wilder could get from his masterwork “Our Town,” which by the way this column is named after. In “Our Town” he focused on the small life in a charming New England town in the 1930s. “The Skin of Our Teeth” also takes place in the small town of Excelsior, N.J., but it concerns itself with the big life questions like who invented the alphabet, the wheel and lever.

The play is consumed with the relationship of hope to despair and reminds me of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” but with dinosaurs and mammoths instead of a hanging tree.
Act One introduces us to the Antrobus family, who live in a suburban town in New Jersey. We get to meet the seductive maid Sabina; Mrs. Antrobus, the keeper of the hearth;  Mr. Antrobus, the doer of great deeds such as inventing the lever, the wheel, the alphabet and the multiplication tables; and their two lovely children, Henry who likes to throw rocks and kill people and Gladys, a prepubescent girl who likes lipstick and makeup. And then, of course, we have the pets, a dinosaur and a wooly mammoth.

Act Two takes place on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, which is filled with conventioneers, prostitutes, bingo parlors, Turkish baths and a fortune teller, tons of fun for one and all. The set itself was a thing of brilliant circus color and beauty, the biggest prop being a huge carnival slide that the characters climb up and then slide down, only to climb up again and slide down again, like the myth of Sisyphus but with more laughs and screams.

In this Garden of Eden we witness the demise of the Antrobus marriage as poor Mr. Antrobus succumbs to the sexy temptress who runs the bingo hall. Bad choice. Young Henry is out killing people and Gladys is having fun in unspeakable ways.

Indeed, Thornton Wilder has come a long way from the sweetness of “Our Town.” The fortune teller speaks up, telling us she cannot see into the past but can predict the future with accuracy and foretells that a great rain and a flood is about to come. In other words, there’s such a thing as too much fun. Ask any reformed alcoholic and he will attest to that truth.

Thornton Wilder is the master of the Third Act. Act Three begins with the stage manager telling the audience that most of the actors have eaten something bad during intermission and have been sent to the hospital with food poisoning. I don’t think they mentioned what the food was, but its my guess that it was apples. The stage crew at that point takes over as replacements and that’s when the real magic begins.

They start rehearsals on a night scene where each crew member recites a verse from a philosopher at each hour of the night. Wilder here presents the audience with the key to the play and how civilization survives and progresses. He suggests that as people sleep, the wisdom contained in the works of the past mystics and geniuses swim around in the night sky like ether and go into us as we sleep.

This concept is similar to Yeats’s “Spiritus Mundi” and Jung’s collective unconscious who also grappled with the mysterious way that people seem to learn from their ancestors and know what they know.

Wilder wonders how humans absorb the ideas found in the great works of literature, including the Torah, the Old Testament, the New Testament, “The Quest for the Holy Grail,” “The Thousand and One Nights,” “Don Quixote,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Les Miserable,” “In Search of Lost Times,” right up to “Look Homeward, Angel.” He’s smart enough to realize that no one actually reads these books, yet he hints that the knowledge found in these works do get into our heads.

The reason we go to plays, and especially great plays, is because the playwright has taken a deep plunge into the Spiritus Mundi, into the pool of our great and hard-earned human wisdom. And when the playwright returns to the surface, his job is to tell us about what he learned. They tell us about what we already know as an audience but need reminding of.
What Thornton Wilder has done in this play is to tell us that the greatest thinkers are lantern bearers who guide us through the darkness. Cormac McCarthy uses the image of light and fire the same way.

And Wilder charges Mrs. Antrobus, the female, with the task of keeping the home fire lit to stave off the cold and he charges Mr. Antrobus with the task of going out into the world and figuring out how to improve life by invention. French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir would rail at this division of labor but so be it.

In this great and odd play, Thornton Wilder is telling us that love and invention are both necessary to keep a civilization going. As Freud once said, life is primarily about love and work and you had better know how to balance them.

And that’s quite a lot to say in a mere two-hour play. God bless you, Thornton Wilder. and you, too, Lileana Blain-Cruz.

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