The Skin of Our Teeth

The Skin of Our Teeth
by Thornton Wilder

The Grand Theatre | March 12–28, 2015

Director Mark Fossen utilized the space in creative ways, such as having actors appearing in the audience, in front of the proscenium, and in the side openings of the stage to create levels and incorporate the audience and actors into the world of the play. Fossen kept the focus on the themes of the story by finding the “love for humanity and an appreciation for the canvas that our existence is painted on” as he states in his director’s note, and allowing the abstract format of the production to support—rather than distract—from these themes.

Utah Theatre Bloggers

Mark Fossen shows his facile knack for directing what could be a musty theater history lesson into shockingly vibrant, must-see entertainment. His affection for the material is evident, and the directing style is very right for this play.

Deseret News

Completed by the author less than a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) broke from established theatrical conventions and walked off with the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Combining farce, burlesque, and satire, and elements of the comic strip, Thornton Wilder depicts an Everyman Family as it narrowly escapes one end-of-the-world disaster after another, from the Ice Age to flood to war.

“We came through the depression by the skin of our teeth, — that’s true! — one more tight squeeze like that and where will we be?”

In the fall of 1942, in the midst of an America lurching from economic depression to war, Thornton Wilder premiered The Skin Of Our Teeth. This play was Wilder’s homage to James Joyce, transformed into a three-act mashup covering the history of man from Cain and Abel through the Ice Age and the Great Flood, and right on up to the modern day. Far from the closely observed small-town life of Our Town’s Grover’s Corners, the town we meet here —Excelsior, New Jersey—is a fantasy filled with dinosaurs and mastodons as well as Homer and Moses.

Thornton Wilder described Our Town as “the life of a village against the life of the stars.” The Skin of Our Teeth might be described as “the life of a family against the life of mankind”

I’ve been lucky enough to work on the American Classics for five years now with the Grand Theater. Of the playwrights I’ve been lucky to celebrate, I think Thornton Wilder is the closest to my heart. Unlike the tortured souls of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, Wilder is filled with faith, hope, and charity. The Skin of Our Teeth is Wilder at his best: full of love for humanity and an appreciation for the canvas that our existence is painted on. Wilder understands the vastness of space and time and knows that we are small … yet he finds beauty, laughter, and joy in that perspective. He knows we are all part of something larger than ourselves.

Right now, a lot of us feel we’re only surviving “by the skin of our teeth” and that one more tight squeeze might be more than we can handle as a family, as a nation, and a planet. Like Wilder’s 1942 audience, we seem to be tossed from crisis to crisis. The journey of the Antrobus family is here to tell us that we just need to hold on to what’s important: our family and our knowledge. With that, we can always survive. With that, we can always build again. With that, we can always build better.