TRIUMPH OF THE WILL
I love how the press notes for A Noise Within‘s stupendous revival of Thornton Wilder‘s The Skin of Our Teeth noted a quote from original director Elia Kazan: “I overheard one couple talking as they left the theater. ‘What’s it all about?’ the man complained to his wife. ‘Why, George,’ she said, ‘it’s about love and hate and passion and everything — ever since the world began.’ ‘Well,’ the man said, ‘there must be more to it than that.’ ” Yeah, it’s like that.
It’s a play for all seasons and all sorrows: Writing during the uncertainty of a world war, Wilder intended his masterpiece — as wobbly as it is — to be a three-act reassurance. A promissory note to be redeemed during misfortunes, it would remind mortals of their better angels. This winner of the 1943 Pulitzer Prize might, he hoped, offer a blueprint for a worthy peace. When better to create one than when we’re threatened with maniacal global dictators? It seems that only during war can we — and Wilder — dream of a better world: In peace, comfort is the main consideration.
It’s all too easy to project disasters that Wilder couldn’t contemplate onto his all-purpose template for struggle and survival — global warming, nuclear war, and a historic migrant crisis, with more people displaced than ever before in modern history. Indeed, in the play, Wilder’s calamities are environmental catastrophes, refugee crises, and military conflicts, still sadly and prophetically relevant today. Few plays have grown so well and truly into the future. As with Our Town, Wilder’s imperishable distillation of the American (and human) experience, The Skin of Our Teeth (alluding to how close we’ve come to annihilation) is a gloriously cautionary consolation, as wise and funny as it is wary (“The glory of the stage,” he wrote, “is that it is always ‘now’ there”). The universal is in the particular and no good deed goes unwitnessed.
When I saw the behemoth production at Lincoln Center last season, the biggest disaster was not in the subject matter, but with a production which assumed bigger is better; I felt bewildered, bothered, and bored. On paper, the events of the three-act play are chaotic, sometimes lacking clarity and cohesion, and that is what felt underscored, not the characters (you can’t argue with the audience leaving in droves between the acts).
However, at the redoubtable classic theater company A Noise Within — where The Skin of Our Teeth opened last weekend in a smashing rendition — it is Wilder’s dialogue, full of Biblical references and amusing quips, that co-artistic directors Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott concentrate on. Even with cataclysms and a reinforcement of the theme that humans barely eke by due to our shortsighted irresponsibility to each other and our planet, I left inspired from witnessing true literature delivered by thespians who refuse to be thwarted by Wilder’s complex, crazy, allegorical genius.
Knowing that “every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger”, Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus have remained married — 5,000 years now! — through an ice age, a great flood, and a global war. A force for progress despite his doubts, Mr. Antrobus is the inventor of the alphabet and the wheel — and he’s not through yet tinkering us into civilization. He protects refugees and cherishes the books that made and keep us human. He sees the family as a unit of persistence but not the greatest reason for prevailing against calamity. Faithful to a fault, his wife, intrepid and doggedly literal-minded, fiercely defends her difficult children — Gladys, demure and unfinished, and Henry (formerly Cain), a testosterone-ridden alpha male with an urge to kill. Wilder’s troubled and embattled Everyman Antrobus family embodies the human race.
In the first act, set in mid-twentieth-century Excelsior, New Jersey, they (barely) endure an ice age, one which requires sacrificing beasts (a mammoth and a dinosaur lounging in the family room are summarily dismissed) to shelter humanity from walls of ice. While it gives new meaning to “keep the home-fires burning”, the maid Sabina has let the fire die on the coldest day of the year. Through the saucy maid Sabina (who believes in her survival at any cost and without any cause), we’re constantly confronted with the play’s meta artificiality. Wilder wanted it to feel like an improvisation, which is exactly how humanity would have to cope with these crises. This fourth-wall breaking dramatist is always willing to play with his play, as well as cast and audience.
The second scrape with ruination, set in a conventional Atlantic City convention complete with beauty pageant, requires humankind to rise above sectional and sexual disruptions to escape a rising ocean. The hurricane that hits here seems perversely and prophetically familiar. So does a short-sighted hedonism that puts the present before the future. Threatening the uneasy cohesion of the Antrobus clan are the challenges of infidelity and adultery (which Sabina incarnates in this act, set on the famous “boardwalk” during a Noah-like convention of mammals) and free-floating violence (embodied by the always discontented Henry, the anarchist within).
In Act III, the too-contemporary final fight depicts the aftermath of a conflict that has devastated America, where our species’ chief hope is to preserve the wisdom of the centuries (beautifully compared by Wilder to the hours of the night and the planets of the solar system — the music of the spheres). As Wilder knew, “the great ‘unread’ classics furnish daily support and stimulation even to people who do not read them.” I teared up just looking at those brittle, embattled old books.
The trick for any production is not to compete with the play’s own irreverence. A very welcome production from what is now the most dependably thrilling company in Los Angeles, the Elliots’ staging moves us from the stereotypical 50s to the Roaring Twenties to an apocalyptic present. Whatever the trappings, they never reduce these archetypes to cartoons. They trust the text, up to and including the bittersweet and highly conditional end.
Delivering a running review of the show even as she performs in it, a pert and impertinent Ann Noble turns Sabina’s every strategic snafu and putative reversal into the laughter of relief and recognition. Frederick Stuart’s stolid but stern Mr. Antrobus is eerily and amazingly like Frederic March, the original 1943 paterfamilias. His solid performance is terrifically contrasted to Trisha Miller, implacably maternal as the protective Mrs. Antrobus, who is also invincibly proto-feminist (she says of women: “We’re not what you’re all told and what you think we are: We’re ourselves.”) Mildred Marie Langford and Christian Henley steep their very different siblings in contagious cruxes of adolescence.
Beyond this nuclear family, however, Wilder honors the supporting cast we call humanity, including the Stage Manager (Kasey Mahaffy) and the actors playing these characters. The Elliots’ terrific 18-member ensemble includes Anthony Adu as an Announcer and Cassandra Marie Murphy as a, well, Cassandra-like fortune teller, prophesying as if pre-inventing Game of Thrones. You’ll also meet such worthies as Homer, Moses, and a Muse.
Shrewdly and warmly, Wilder transforms what could have been a sententious lecture into a playful and presentational play. It’s two-and-a-half hours (shorter due to the excision of the second intermission) of sweetly subversive entertainment, an irresistible charmer not afraid to ask hard questions or offer intriguing solutions. Our “eternal family,” as he put it, has never so needed Wilder’s rueful comforts or ethical encouragement. He knew that this play “mostly comes alive under conditions of crisis.” Right now it couldn’t be more required.
photos by Craig Schwartz
The creative team for The Skin of Our Teeth includes scenic designer Frederica Nascimento; lighting designer Ken Booth; composer and sound designer Robert Oriol; costume designer Garry Lennon; wig and make up designer Tony Valdés; and dramaturg Miranda Johnson-Haddad. The production stage manager is Angela Sonner, assisted by Hope Matthews.
The Skin of Our Teeth
A Noise Within
3352 E Foothill Blvd in Pasadena
Thurs-Sat at 7:30; Sat & Sun at 2ends on September 29, 2024
for tickets, call 626.356.3100 visit A Noise Within