Cataclysmic climate change, economic collapse, apocalyptic war . . . these are the challenges facing the characters in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, now receiving a beautifully molded production at the Artistic Home. First presented on Broadway in October 1942, just ten months after Pearl Harbor, this Pulitzer Prize-winning proto-absurdist comedy about the uncertain fate of the human race “was written on the eve of our entrance into the war and under strong emotion,” Wilder said, “and I think it mostly comes alive under conditions of crisis.” Today, the work seems all too timely, but also perplexing—more urgent than ever, yet less reassuring.
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Set mostly in a pleasant, middle-class suburban home, The Skin of Our Teeth focuses on what a narrator describes as “a typical American family”—the Antrobuses of 216 Cedar Street, Excelsior, New Jersey. George Antrobus is an industrious inventor, his wife, Maggie, a dedicated homemaker. Their teenage son, Henry, is a rebellious troublemaker, but Maggie strives to shield him from his father’s unpredictable anger. Henry’s younger sister, Gladys, meanwhile, is the apple of daddy’s eye.
Over the course of three acts, the Antrobus clan faces down an ice age, a great flood, and finally a devastating conflict that pits George and Henry—civilization and savagery—against each other. It’s this last catastrophe that most severely threatens the Antrobuses, whose name is a play on anthropos, the Greek word for “human.” We’ll survive as long as men and women bond together and parents protect their children, Wilder suggests. But if the family crumbles, so will the human race.
