A new production of Thornton Wilder’s 1942 play “The Skin of Our Teeth,” is less a faithful adaptation than a work of criticism, Vinson Cunningham writes.
Without quite knowing why, I’ve always disliked the truism that conflict is drama’s fundamental ingredient. Yes, we fight and cajole and coax and settle scores: that’s our species, and it’s frequently how we show ourselves onstage. But this bit of craft wisdom—conflict is king—is the handmaiden of a paranoid anthropology, and a limited way of thinking about action and speech. We humans do much more than struggle, will against will.
In “The Skin of Our Teeth,” Ruff plays Mrs. Antrobus, the matriarch of the Antrobus family. The Antrobuses—a skewed nuclear unit whose surname is close to, Greek for “man”—scuttle frenetically through the disjointed action of Wilder’s play, standing in for humanity at various fraught junctures. The play’s three acts don’t tell a unified story, but what they have in common is the threat of impending doom.
Any audience member these days will also, like the Antrobuses, have some end-time scenario in mind; the play’s final act takes place in the aftermath of a seven-year-long war, which seems as probable today as it must have when the show premièred, in the early forties.
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